Art Of Self Destruction Quotes & Sayings

I think art is inherently nonviolent and it actually occupies your mind with creation rather than destruction. — Anthony Kiedis

When I look back on the townscapes now, they do seem to me to recall certain images of the destruction of Dresden during the war. — Gerhard Richter

Poetry leads us to the unstructured sources of our beings, to the unknown, and returns us to our rational, structured selves refreshed. Having once experienced the mystery, plenitude, contradiction, and composure of a work of art, we afterward have a built-in resistance to the slogans and propaganda of oversimplification that have often contributed to the destruction of human life. Poetry is a verbal means to a nonverbal source. It is a motion to no-motion, to the still point of contemplation and deep realization. — A.R. Ammons

It were indeed to be wish'd that our art had been less ingenious, in contriving means destructive to mankind; we mean those instruments of war, which were unknown to the ancients, and have made such havoc among the moderns. But as men have always been bent on seeking each other's destruction by continual wars; and as force, when brought against us, can only be repelled by force; the chief support of war, must, after money, be now sought in chemistry. — Hermann Boerhaave

Self-destruction is an art; cursed are the exponents. — Anurag Shourie

It is not my purpose here to document the destruction caused by war [...] The point is to ask ourselves why these accounts have not had greater effect. [...] Why is it that many of us are deeply moved by visual art, fiction, and firsthand accounts of destruction and yet accept war as a means of resolving conflict or defending ourselves? — Nel Noddings

More than any other beauty (though it is true of all beauty except in art) passion seems to me to have the seeds of its own destruction in it. — May Sarton

And so, he knows. He wants, he needs, to do the immoral, irresponsible thing. He wants to let this boy court his own destruction. He wants to commit that cruelty. Or (kinder, gentler version) he doesn't want to reconfirm his allegiance to the realm of the sensible, all the good people who take responsibility, who go to the right and necessary parties, who sell art made of two-by-fours and carpet remnants. He wants, for at least a little while, to live in that other, darker world - Blake's London, Courbet's Paris; raucous, unsanitary places where good behavior was the province of decent, ordinary people who produced no works of genius. — Michael Cunningham

Theories of art carry the seeds of their own destruction. — Steven Pinker

You are a grand nerveux, Vincent," Doctor Rey had told him. "You never have been normal. But then, no artist is normal; if he were, he wouldn't be an artist. Normal men don't create works of art. They eat, sleep, hold down routine jobs, and die. You are hypersensitive to life and nature; that's why you are able to interpret for the rest of us. But if you are not careful, that very hypersensitiveness will lead you to your destruction. The strain of it breaks every artist in time. — Irving Stone

The power of the artform is stronger than stone, the poet says, and chooses the sonnet, a form concerned with argument and persuasion, to say so. This sonnet, he says, will last longer than any gravestone-and you'll be made shinier, brighter, by it. In this form it will-and therefore you will-avoid destruction by war, history, time generally; it'll even keep you alive after death; in fact it'll form a place for you to live, not die, where you'll be seen in the eyes of and the context of this love right to the end of time. — Ali Smith

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Every type of destruction that human philosophy, human science, human reason, human art, human cunning, human force, and human brutality could bring to bear against this Book, and yet the Bible stands absolutely unshaken today. At times almost all the wise and great of the earth have been pitted against the Bible, and only an obscure few for it. Yet it has stood. — R.A. Torrey

Mankind could point with pride to this fine flower of the human spirit--if it were not for one thing: namely that God is God and grace is grace. At this point begins the destruction of our illusions and of our cultural enthusiasm, the great destruction which God himself effects, and which the ancient myth of the tower of Babel typifies. 'And if by grace, then it is no more of works; otherwise grace is no more grace.' Our way to the eternal is interrupted and we are plunged back into the depths from which we came, with out philosophy and art, our morality and religion. For another way now opens, the way of God to man, the way of revelation and grace, the way of Christ, the way of justification by faith alone. 'My ways are not your ways,' that is the answer now. It is not we who go to God, but God who comes to us. It is not religion that sets us right with God, for God alone can do this; it is his action on which we must depend. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

The goal of the martial arts is not for the destruction of an opponent, but rather for self-growth and self-perfection. The practice of a martial art should be a practice of love - for the preservation of life, for the preservation of body, and for the preservation of family and friends. — Dan Inosanto

All things are changing; and thou thyself art in continuous mutation and in a manner in continuous destruction and the whole universe to. — Marcus Aurelius

It is comforting that travel should have an architecture, and that it is possible to contribute a few stones to it, although the traveller is less like one who constructs landscapes
for that is a sedentary task
than like one who destroys them ... But even destruction is a form of architecture, a deconstruction that follows certain rules and calculations, an art of disassembling and reassembling, or of creating another and different order. — Claudio Magris

What passes for wine among us, is not the juice of the grape. It is an adulterous mixture, brewed up of nauseous ingredients, by dunces, who are bunglers in the art of poison-making; and yet we, and our forefathers, are and have been poisoned by this cursed drench, without taste or flavour - The only genuine and wholesome beveridge in England, is London porter, and Dorchester table-beer; but as for your ale and your gin, your cyder and your perry, and all the trashy family of made wines, I detest them as infernal compositions, contrived for the destruction of the human species. — Tobias Smollett

An artist adopts a radically different view regarding the importance of time than a businessperson does. Instead of perceiving time as a merchantable facet doled out incrementally according to marketplace demands, an artist portrays time as an agent of destruction. The irrevocability of time frames the human condition. Time might the medium of all human experience, but its passage obscures and eventually obliterates all human endeavors. Time unchecked leads to a blank slate of nothingness. Time's destructive march towards meaningless is arrested through memory and art depicting humankind's struggles and accomplishments. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Sense (for a particular art, science, human being, and so forth) is divided spirit; self-restraint is consequently the result of self-creation and self-destruction. — Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

I'd believed mine was the greatest of all the arts, the noblest of all the lies, the creation of hope. I thought hope could overcome everything, but I was wrong. Hope cannot overcome truth. Hope and truth cannot co-exist. Truth destroys hope. The most savage cruelties man inflicts on man are committed in the pursuit of truth. My last lie had been the most honest, the most honorable of them all, for there is an art greater even than the creation of hope. The greatest art of all is the destruction of truth. — Karen Maitland

New arts destroy the old. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

You see, for me a painting is a dramatic action in the course of which the reality finds itself split apart. For me, that dramatic action takes precedence over all other considerations. The pure plastic act is only secondary as far as I'm concerned. What counts is the drama of that plastic art, the moment at which the universe comes out of itself and meets its own destruction. — Francoise Gilot

[A]s it is impossible that any man endowed with rational faculties, and being in a state of freedom, should willingly agree, without some motive of love or friendship, absolutely to sacrifice his own interest to that of another; it becomes necessary to impose upon him, to persuade him, that his own good is designed, and that he will be a gainer by coming into those schemes, which are, in reality, calculated for his destruction. And this, if I mistake not, is the very essence of that excellent art, called the art of politics. — Henry Fielding

The urge to destroy is also a creative urge. — Mikhail Bakunin

THE ART OF PEACE does not rely on weapons or brute force to succeed; instead, we put ourselves in tune with the universe, maintain peace in our own realms, nurture life, and prevent death and destruction. The true meaning of the term samurai is one who serves and adheres to the power of love. — Morihei Ueshiba

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading.
Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain
boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.
Now the subject who keeps the two texts in his field and in his hands the reins of pleasure and bliss is an anachronic subject, for he simultaneously and contradictorily participates in the profound hedonism of all culture (which permeates him quietly under the cover of an "art de vivre" shared by the old books) and in the destruction of that culture: he enjoys the consistency of his selfhood (that is his pleasure) and seeks its loss (that is his bliss). He is a subject split twice over, doubly perverse. — Roland Barthes

Maybe it was true that only beauty would save the world, or truth, or some other high-flown garbage; but fear was still more powerful than anything else. Fear destroyed everything: everything born of beauty, the tender shoots of all that was fine, wise, eternal... — Lyudmila Ulitskaya

A time will come when the science of destruction shall bend before the arts of peace; when the genius which multiplies our powers, which creates new products, which diffuses comfort and happiness among the great mass of the people, shall occupy in the general estimation of mankind that rank which reason and common sense now assign to it. — Francois Arago

He was an artist, and she, an anarchist, the destroyer of his beautiful creations. His body tensed, pushing hot adrenaline through his body with irascible rage. His anger gave way to lamentation as his heart wailed for his lost inventions. His mind saw each one desperately screaming for help, their outcries echoing between the orange flames and ashy ruins of their compatriots. — Emmie White

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law ... . They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission. - Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters, 2002 — Naomi Klein

Perhaps the most extraordinary characteristic of current America is the attempt to reduce life to buying and selling. Life is not love unless love is sex and bought and sold. Life is not knowledge save knowledge of technique, of science for destruction. Life is not beauty except beauty for sale. Life is not art unless its price is high and it is sold for profit. All life is production for profit, and for what is profit but for buying and selling again? — W.E.B. Du Bois

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings — Edvard Munch

I thought about Stockhausen. What had prompted him to call the attacks a work of art? For him, I thought, it was not a matter of finding death beautiful, but rather seeing that someone had taken liberties in reality that an artist could only dream of. That was both the virtue and the vice of art. In art, you can kill with impunity - destroy the world, perpetrate a holocaust, whip up the apocalypse. But it's only art. You can blow up five million people in an opera and not have anywhere near the impact of blowing up five thousand in reality. Stockhausen seemed to realize this, since the terrorism caused him to feel that being a composer was nothing. In that sense, his words were a moral statement about the limits of art, not an immoral statement about aestheticizing destruction. — Supervert

Each person entering our world brings either a contribution or destruction. Trying to be "always nice" is to invite certain disaster. Those with poisonous attitudes, strange opinions, and caustic conversations love to look for someone nice who will listen to them. They love to dump their verbal garbage into the mental factory of anyone willing to listen. A major challenge in life is for each person to learn the art of standing guard at the doorway of their mind. Carefully examine the credentials and authority of those seeking to enter within that place where your attitudes are formed. — Jim Rohn

Analysis is the art of creation through destruction. — P.S. Baber