The refining influence is the study of art, which is the science of beauty; and I find that every man values every scrap of knowledge in art, every observation of his own in it, every hint he has caught from another. For the laws of beauty are the beauty of beauty, and give the mind the same or a higher joy than the sight of it gives the senses. The study of art is of high value to the growth of the intellect.
Some authorities hold that the young ought not to lie at all. That, of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still, while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain, and I believe I am right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance and precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable.
The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions the distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Yet again, the more you strive for some kind of perfection or mastery—in morals, in art or in spirituality—the more you see that you are playing a rarified and lofty form of the old ego-game, and that your attainment of any height is apparent to yourself and to others only by contrast with someone else's depth or failure.
The clever combatant looks to the effect of combined energy, and does not require too much from individuals. Hence his ability to pick out the right men and utilize combined energy
Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.
In our fine arts, not imitation, but creation is the aim... The details, the prose of nature, he should omit, and give us only the spirit and splendour.
I do think comics are a dying art form because newspapers are a dying medium. But it's not to say that in the next generation, where there's people getting their news electronically, comics won't survive. Right now, they're still largely attached to the newspaper world. And the more they can break away from that, the more they have a chance to live on.
There is an art of seeing things as they are: without naming, without being caught in a network of words, without thinking interfering with perception.