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What is Culture For? QUOTES

What is Culture For? QUOTES

1 " Art can do the opposite of glamorising the unattainable; it can reawaken us to the genuine merit of life as we’re forced to lead it. It is advertising for the things we really need. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

2 " It makes no sense, and is a form of twisted narcissism, to imagine that our era has any kind of monopoly on idiocy and disaster. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

3 " The more difficult our lives, the less it might take to make us cry; even a flower might start to move us. The tears – if they come – are in response not to how sad the flower is, but how its prettiness exists within such a very pitiless and mean world. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

4 " We’re leaky creatures. Hope drains away, not because the situation is genuinely hopeless but because we are so attuned to seeing what’s wrong. It’s precisely because we so readily lose hope that the optimistic reminders provided by culture – hope in amber – are so important to us. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

5 " We hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help to return us to a viable mean. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

6 " One of the more frustrating, yet fundamental, things about being human is that we can’t understand ourselves very well. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

7 " Great authors turn vagueness into clarity. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

8 " The more writers we read, the better our understanding of our own mind stands to be. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

9 " We need to build lives in which we can arrange around us the kind of art that will daily bring the best sides of us to the fore. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

10 " The arts allow us to become the soulmates of people who – despite having been born in 1630 or 1808 – are in limited, but crucial, ways our proper companions. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

11 " If advertising images carry a lot of the blame for instilling a sickness in our souls, the images of artists reconcile us with our realities and reawaken us to the genuine, but too-easily forgotten, value of our lives. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

12 " Given the enormous role of sadness in our lives, it is one of the greatest emotional skills to know how to arrange around us those cultural works that can best help to turn our panic or sense of persecution into consolation and nurture. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

13 " Sophisticated people tend to scorn. They are afraid that such enthusiasms might be evidence of a failure to acknowledge or understand the awful dimensions of the world. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

14 " We need culture around us because we are so poor at retaining our equilibrium and maturity. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?

15 " In reality we rarely have the problem of being naively contented with our lives, or with the world in general. On the contrary, we are remorselessly confronted by our own failings and by the radical imperfections of society. Rather than needing a stern dose of disenchantment, we’re more likely to require art-tools that can feed and sustain our beleaguered optimism. "

― The School of Life , What is Culture For?