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Let me formulate the artistic disposition as follows: it is reacting with one’s ideal to the flaw in oneself and in the world, and somehow making that reaction formation solid enough in the medium so that it indeed becomes an improved bit of real world for others.

— Paul Goodman Growing Up Absurd (1956)

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More quotes by Paul Goodman

Perhaps the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable.

Growing Up Absurd (1956)

It is desperately hard these days for an average child to grow up to be a man, for our present organized system does not want men. They are not safe.

Growing Up Absurd (1956)

We certainly have at present the dismal situation that the most imaginative men are directed by a group, the top managers, who are among the least.

Growing Up Absurd (1956)

When the sciences are supreme, average people lose their feeling of causality.

Growing Up Absurd (1956)

Not to teach the whole curriculum is to give up on the whole man.

Growing Up Absurd (1956)

All Paul Goodman quotes →

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Paul Goodman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.