“Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast.”— Blaise Pascal, amazon.com
“I can’t endure the thought that a man of lofty mind and heart begins with the ideal of the Madonna and ends with the ideal of Sodom. What's still more awful is that a man with the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not renounce the ideal of the Madonna.”— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Dmitri Karamazov, amazon.com
“For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin.”— Paul of Tarsus, biblehub.com
“This love I live is nowhere in my heart, it cannot stay with what is mortal, where it meets with error and with evil thought.”— Michelangelo Buonarroti, amazon.com
“An artist is a man who tries to express the inexpressible. He struggles and suffers knowing that he can never realize his most perfect ideal. Occasional moments of ecstasy lure him on, but nothing is final in art, it is always progressing.”— Alvin Langdon Coburn, masters-of-photography.com
“I am obsessed with beauty. I want everything to be perfect, and of course it isn’t. And that’s a tough place to be because you’re never satisfied.”— Robert Mapplethorpe, news.artnet.com
“Every day I think about untwisting and untangling these strings I'm in. And to lead a pure life. I look ahead at a clear sky, ain't gonna get there, but it's a nice dream, it's a nice dream.”— Iggy Pop, open.spotify.com
“The artist is a seer, a becomer. He has seen something in life that is too great, too unbearable also, and the mutual embrace of life with what threatens it, so that the corner of nature or districts of the town that he sees, along with their characters, accede to a vision that, through them, compos…”— Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, amazon.com