Honoré de Balzac · 57 pages
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“Young man,' Porbus said, seeing Poussin stare open-mouthed at a picture, 'Don't look at the canvas too long, it will drive you to despair.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“[Raphael's] great superiority is due to the instinctive sense which, in him, seems to desire to shatter form. Form is, in his figures, what it is in ourselves, an interpreter for the communication of ideas and sensations, an exhaustless source of poetic inspiration. Every figure is a world in itself, a portrait of which the original appeared in a sublime vision, in a flood of light, pointed to by an inward voice, laid bare by a divine finger which showed what the sources of expression had been in the whole past life of the subject.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“You have wavered uncertainly between two systems, between drawing and coloring, between the painstaking phlegm, the stiff precision, of the old German masters, and the dazzling ardor, the happy fertility, of the Italian painters.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“However," he continued, "this canvas is preferable to the paintings of that varlet Rubens, with his mountains of Flemish flesh sprinkled with vermilion, his waves of red hair and his medley of colors.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“A line is a method of expressing the effect of light upon an object; but there are no lines in Nature, everything is solid. We draw by modeling, that is to say, that we disengage an object from its setting; the distribution of the light alone gives to a body the appearance by which we know it.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“But, after all, too much knowledge, like ignorance, brings you to a negation.”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“[...]O que está faltando? Um nada, mas um nada que é tudo. Vocês têm a aparência da vida mas não expressam o seu excesso transbordante, esse não sei o quê que talvez seja a alma e que flutua enevoadamente sobre o invólucro[...]”
― Honoré de Balzac, quote from La Obra Maestra Desconocida
“Gymnastes, Gargantua’ya düşmanın ardına düşmenin gerekli olup olmadığını sordu.
Gargantua şöyle karşılık verdi ona:
“Hiç gerekli değil, çünkü gerçek askerlik sanatı gereğince düşmanı umutsuzluğa düşürmemeliyiz; bıçak kemiğe dayandı mı, düşman yıpranıp tükenmekte olan gücünü ve yüreğini yeniden toparlayıverir. Hiçbir kurtuluş umudu kalmaması, bitmiş tükenmiş insanları diriltip kurtaracak olan ilaçların en iyisidir. Nice zaferler, yenenlerin elinden kaçıp yenilenlerin eline geçmiştir, çünkü yenenler hak ettikleri kadarıyla yetinmeyip her şeyi çiğneyip yok etmeye, düşmanlarını haber götürecek tek kişi bırakmamacasına öldürmeye kalkmışlardır! Düşmanlarınıza kapıları, yolları açın her zaman; hatta gümüşten bir köprü kurun onlara geçip gitmeleri için.”
― François Rabelais, quote from Gargantua
“was nearly one in the morning when I realised that I was about to do something stupid. Ordinarily, I'm not someone who is prone to random acts of mischief. By day I'm as straight as they come. But get a few glasses of red into me, and suddenly”
― Maya Cross, quote from Locked
“I am Notak,” he answered in his dry, normal voice. “I kill Demons.”
― S.G. Night, quote from Attrition: the First Act of Penance
“The twentieth century ended with its dreams in ruins. The notion of the community as a voluntary association of enlightened citizens has died forever. We realize how suffocatingly humane we've become, dedicated to moderation and the middle way. The suburbanization of the soul has overrun our planet like the plague.”
― J.G. Ballard, quote from Super-Cannes
“Dear Judy Blume, why didn’t you write a book about how to survive talking to your centuries-old, super-duper experienced, smoking-hot soul mate about sex for the first time ever? That book would have been extremely helpful in preparing me for this incredibly awkward situation.”
― Karen Amanda Hooper, quote from Taking Back Forever
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