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The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination QUOTES

The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination QUOTES

1 " Like Hamlet, Goethe's Faust offers a wide panorama of scenes from the vulgar to the sublime, with passages of wondrous poetry that can be sensed even through the veil of translation. And it also preserves the iridescence of its modern theme. From it Oswald Spengler christened our Western culture 'Faustian,' and others too have found it an unexcelled metaphor for the infinitely aspiring always dissatisfied modern self.

Goethe himself was wary of simple explanations. When his friends accused him of incompetence in metaphysics, he replied. 'I, being an artist, regard this as of little moment. Indeed, I prefer that the principle from which and through which I work should be hidden from me. "

― Daniel J. Boorstin , The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

2 " This sense of time, the awareness that countless others have come before and that others will follow in endless generations, distinguishes man from other animals. With this discovery of the meaning of death—that man’s own life is limited—the life of architecture begins. And so begins man the creator’s effort to conquer time. "

― Daniel J. Boorstin , The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

3 " Greek philosophers, beginning with Thales, were men of speculative temperament. What is the world made of? What are the elements and the processes by which the world is transformed? Greek philosophy and science were born together, of the passion to know. The Buddha’s aim was not to know the world or to improve it but to escape its suffering. His whole concern was salvation. It is not easy for us in the West to understand or even name this Buddhist concern. To say that the Buddhists had a “philosophy” would be misleading. "

― Daniel J. Boorstin , The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

4 " The Greeks saw the advance of civilization bringing new ills. Their sour parable of technological progress was the familiar myth of Prometheus. Punished for affronting the gods by stealing fire for men’s use, Prometheus was chained to a rock so an eagle could feed on his liver, which grew back each night. According to Lucretius, necessity had led men to invent, and then inventions spawned frivolous needs that equipped and encouraged them to slaughter one another in war. "

― Daniel J. Boorstin , The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

5 " Greek was the language of most citizens of Constantinople, but the commission’s product was in Latin, Justinian’s native language. The Corpus Juris Civilis, as the whole codifying work came to be called, had no effective competition in the West for thirteen hundred years, and the Roman Empire survived in Justinian’s Byzantine legal incarnation. "

― Daniel J. Boorstin , The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

6 " For the Hindu the creation was not a bringing into being of the wonder of the world. Rather it was a dismemberment, a disintegration of the original Oneness. For him the Creation seemed not the expression of a rational, benevolent Maker in wondrous new forms but a fragmenting of the unity of nature into countless limited forms. The Hindu saw the creation of our world as “the self-limitation of the transcendent. "

― Daniel J. Boorstin , The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

7 " While the Gregorian chant in its afterlife has flourished as the authentic music of the Roman Church, its original character still remains in doubt. Not until the twentieth century did the Gregorian chant come back into its own. The old melodies had been mutilated into a monotonous plainchant to facilitate organ accompaniment. In 1889 the scholarly Benedictine monks of Solesmes in France undertook to rediscover the medieval practice. Their product was numerous volumes of “Gregorian chants” in a free-flowing nonrhythmic style. By 1903 they had recaptured the Gregorian chant to the satisfaction of Pope Pius X, himself a scholar of musical history, who established their versions of the Gregorian melodies by his encyclical motu proprio. But the rhythms still remain a puzzle. Pius X’s purified Gregorian chant banned the “theatrical style” of recitation, forbade the use of instruments, replaced women by boys in the church choir, and restricted the use of the organ. A Vatican Edition provided an authorized corpus of plainchant, which would prevail in the modern Catholic world. "

― Daniel J. Boorstin , The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

8 " The first literary work in prose was history. And we call Herodotus (c.480–c.425 B.C.) the Father of History because his is the earliest surviving work in Greek prose that aimed to give literary form to an extended narrative of the past. The Greek historie means “inquiry” or the search for truth. Herodotus might also perhaps be called the Father of Prose, for until his time verse was still the normal vehicle for narratives of great events and heroes of the past. "

― Daniel J. Boorstin , The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

9 " When photography appeared in the nineteenth century, it offered a new challenge to the mullahs’ theological acrobatics. Muslims wishing to be photographed remembered the Hadiths against pictorial representation. They were glad to be told that since photographs were made by God Himself through the agency of His Sun they were not under the ban of the paintings by presumptuous human artists. Yet in much of the Muslim world, photographs remained under the Prophet’s ban. A Muslim photographer in Delphi, who had spent many years successfully photographing people in groups, in an onrush of conscience finally destroyed all his plates. "

― Daniel J. Boorstin , The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

10 " Most remarkable was the burst of creative energy that had brought forth these paintings in the first place, a flowering of visual art among the Palaeolithic hunting peoples. Because it happened in prehistory, we are inclined to charge it to the “normal” development of cultures, and so rob it of its mystery and surprise. We are told to see here a predictable stage of cultural anthropology. Or was it an unaccountable efflorescence of Man the Creator—none the less unaccountable because the artists remain anonymous? Discovery of Altamira was momentous for our grasp of the history of the arts, showing us that man’s creations do not necessarily improve with his tools, or with the passage of time. "

― Daniel J. Boorstin , The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

11 " Dominated as we are by graphic vistas in perspective, we hardly remember the philosophers’ arguments against this “perspective” way of seeing the world. Plato, who had his own way of looking at everything, objected to the very same “deception” of the senses that Vitruvius had praised as a way of giving a “faithful representation of the appearance of buildings in painted scenery.” If two objects or two persons were really the same size, Plato argued, the honest artist should make them so in his picture, and not depict one smaller than the other simply because it was seen at a greater distance. "

― Daniel J. Boorstin , The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination

12 " Unlike the Western world of a surprising Creation, of man at war with nature, the world of Confucius transformed by Taoist and Buddhist currents saw man at home among transformations, procreations, and re-creations. "

― Daniel J. Boorstin , The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination