Where the moralist would be filled with indignation and the tragic poet with pity and terror, mythology breaks the whole of life into a vast, horrendous Divine Comedy. Its Olympian laugh is not escapist in the least, but hard, with the hardness of life itself—which, we may take it, is the hardness of God, the Creator. Mythology, in this respect, makes the tragic attitude seem somewhat hysterical, and the merely moral judgment shortsighted. Yet the hardness is balanced by an assurance that all that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain. Thus the tales are both pitiless and terrorless—suffused with the joy of a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all of the self-centered, battling egos that are born and die in time.
The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.
Before I studied the art, a punch to me was just like a punch, a kick just like a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick no longer a kick. Now that I’ve understood the art, a punch is just like a punch, a kick just like a kick.
True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.
But he [Bishop Wilkins] also created a beautiful word, a word that’s a poem in itself, full of hopelessness, sadness, and despair: the word neverness. A beautiful word, no? He invented it, and I don’t know why the poets left it lying about and never used it.
The isms go; the ist dies; art remains.
Irony in place of balls, balls in place of brains
Brains in place of soul, where is the soul?
Where is the love, where am I?
We shall go on for quite a long time talking of books and writing books, pretending all the while not to notice that the church is empty and the parishioners have gone elsewhere to attend other gods
Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.
To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass—seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.
Be brutal with the past, especially your own, and have no respect for the philosophies that are foisted on you from outside.
The three most important things I know about the design process
Don’t ask, observe. Understanding your users is the foundation of the design process. Take the time to observe people in the context where your design will live. What job are they trying to get done? How are they doing it right now? What frustrates them?
Prototype, test, iterate. Use rapid prototyping to quickly test assumptions. The wisdom of the designer must be verified against real-world use.
Everything is user experience. UX must be a deeply-held perspective that fundamentally shapes the work of the product team. Every point at which a customer interacts with a product must be designed with care.
The eye was born, knowledge was born, wisdom was born, science was born, light was born.
The role of design seems to be to make the world a better place. It’s as if designers have all sworn an oath never to think a bad thought. We seem to have this blind optimism about the future and about technology. Designers somehow automatically think that design is neutral and implicitly good.
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