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" "Mesmo para aqueles dentre nós que ela fez artistas, foi por acaso, e apenas parcialmente, que ela levantou o véu. Apenas numa direção ela esqueceu de ligar a percepção à necessidade. E como cada direção corresponde ao que chamamos de sentido, é por um desses sentidos, e apenas por esse sentido, que o artista em geral se consagra à arte. Daí, na origem, a diversidade das artes. Daí também a especialidade das
predisposições. Um artista se aplicará às cores e às formas, e como ama a cor pela cor, a forma pela forma, como as percebe por elas e não para ele, é a vida interior das coisas que ele verá transparecer através de suas formas e cores. Ele fará a vida entrar aos poucos em nossa percepção a princípio confundida. Por um momento pelo menos ele nos desligará dos preconceitos de forma e cor que se interpunham entre nosso olho e a realidade. E realizará assim a mais alta ambição da arte, que é no caso a de nos revelar a natureza.
Henri-Louis Bergson (18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential in the first half of the 20th century. He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Biography information from Wikiquote
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We say “universe” and the word makes us think of a possible unification of things. One can be a spiritualist, a materialist, a pantheist, just as one can be indifferent to philosophy and satisfied with common sense: the fact remains that one always conceives of one or several simple principles by which the whole of material and moral things might be explained. This is because our intelligence loves simplicity. It seeks to reduce effort, and insists that nature was arranged in such a way as to demand of us, in order to be thought, the least possible labor. It therefore provides itself with the exact minimum of elements and principles with which to recompose the indefinite series of objects and events. But if instead of reconstructing things ideally for the greater satisfaction of our reason we confine ourselves purely and simply to what is given us by experience, we should think and express ourselves in quite another way. While our intelligence with its habits of economy imagines effects as strictly proportioned to their causes, nature, in its extravagance, puts into the cause much more than is required to produce the effect. While our motto is Exactly what is necessary, nature’s motto is More than is necessary, — too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything. Reality, as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant. Between this reality and the one constructed by the philosophers, I believe he would have established the same relation as between the life we live every day and the life which actors portray in the evening on the stage. On the stage, each actor says and does only what has to be said and done; the scenes are clear-cut; the play has a beginning, a middle and an end; and everything is worked out as economically as possible with a view to an ending which will be happy or tragic. But in life, a multitude of useless things are said, many superfluous gestures made, there are no sharply-drawn situations; nothing happens as simply or as completely