People From Boston

"A work will be treated as art within a certain circle – that is, within the circle of let's say ten thousand people. There are about ten thousand in the world today who are prepared to take it on face value if you present anything to them as art, they deal with it straight on as art and tell you whether it stimulates them, moves them, or not. Some of them might even buy it.. .Anyway, it seems to me that within that ring of ten thousand, fortunately, that sincerity issue [the issue: is something art or not] is over. The reason why that issue failed is that it became obvious no one would live a life of art, a life of poverty, just to pull somebody's legs. In other words, there were compensating sacrifices for what people did."

"I'm an anti-Platonist, so I wouldn't say that stock was a stock of ideas or certainly not an ideal form, because I don't believe there is something out there, except out there. There's something in here and there's something out there, and there's mediation between the two."

"The Duchamp thing is played both ways. The 'Urinal' [famous 'ready-made' of Marcel Duchamp ] signed R. Mutt, is played as an art object, and then as the opposite of a legitimate art object. And it vacillates back and forth. Well perhaps that is a nice thing, but I don't know. I find Duchampianism a bore. It's very adolescent. I was very much excited by it when I was a teenager.. .My tradition is quite different. My conscious tradition is through Constantin Brâncuși, and Brancusi just strikes me as an infinitely wiser and infinitely more talented, an infinitely stronger figure than Duchamp. I think I could have done my work if Duchamp had not lived. I could not have done my work if Brancusi had not lived."

"It comes to me as a desire to have something in the world. And again to quote Blake, 'It is better to murder an infant in the cradle than to nurse an ungratified desire.'.. .You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen.. ..when you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things."

"You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen.. ..when you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things."

"I like the description 'Physical art'. I think maybe art emerged when man first began to distinguish himself from nature. Art is part of himself, which he returns perhaps as an homage to the nature which he left. Of course, he never left nature. The rise of consciousness, perhaps.. .The main thing we believe, that separated us from not only animals but from the stones, is the fact that we are not stones, that we are not dogs. Now that is an assumption, perhaps it's a false assumption. But anyway, somehow I think one of the greatest functions of art is that man can feed back to his own consciousness through the knowledge that he is not a stone or not a dog. [December 1969; quote from a talk with his audience]"

"Well sure, my sculptures are floor pieces. Each one, like any area on the surface of the earth, supports a column of air that weighs – what is it? – 14.7 pounds per square inch. So in a sense, that might represent a column. It's not an idea, it's a sense of something you know, a demarked place. Somehow I think I always thought of it going that way, rather than an idea of a narrowing triangle going to the center of the earth.. .I have nothing to do with Conceptual art [in contrast to his Physical Art, as Carl Andre called his sculpture art already in 1969]]. I'm not interested in ideas. If I were interested in ideas, I'd be in a field where what we think in is ideas.. .I don't really know what an idea is. One thing for me is that if I can frame something in language, I would never make art out of it. I make art out of things which cannot be framed in any other way. [quote from a talk with the audience, December 1969]"

"When I visit places remote from where I ordinarily work, people ask me long, elaborate questions that could not possibly have any relationship to my work. The people haven't ever seen it, and so I say: 'But my dear sir, have you ever seen my work?' The response is: 'Of course, I've seen many of your works.' - 'But where?' - 'in [the art-magazine] 'Artforum', Art in America..' - I say: 'Have you ever actually seen one of the objects, have you actually stood on one of them?'"

"Whole poems are made out of many single poems we call words.. .I am trying to recover a part of the poet's work which has been lost. Our first poets were the namers, not the rhymers."

"We live in a world of replicas, and I try desperately in a world of replicas to produce things that are not replicas of anything."

"FORM = STRUCTURE = PLACE"

"There should be no one place or even a group of places where you should be. [quote, 1969]"

"PROPOSAL FOR AN EXPLOSION - An appropriate contractor is retained to place and fuse an explosive charge sufficient to produce a crater 12 inches deep and 144 inches diameter. The charge is detonated by the sculptor, Carl Andre 5-7-[19]67"

"The course of development"

"Emerson writes in his Journal that all men try their hands at poetry, but few know which their poems are. The poets are not those who write poems, but those who know which of the things they write are poems."

"Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessity of painting. Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stella's painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These path leads only into painting."

"I realized the wood was better before I cut it, than after. I did not improve it in any way [by carving it]."

"Life is incredibly short, yet we're always told that change takes time. For a race of mortals, dicking around just isn't acceptable."

"Soon, for me, the light of day Shall for ever, pass away; Then, from sin and sorrow, free, Take me, Lord, to dwell with Thee."

"Make us mindful of Thy mercies in the past, and faithful to the memories and traditions of truth and justice, of religion and patriotism, in those that have gone before us."

"The success of sainthood is the success attained by struggle and suffering and achieved by faith; a success of honor, of clean hands and pure heart, of service to man and glory to God."

"[L]ife has no smooth road for any of us. And in the bracing atmosphere of a high aim, the very roughness stimulates the climber to sturdier and steadier steps, till that other legend of the rough places fulfils itself at last; per aspera ad astra; over steep ways to the stars."

"Enthusiasm is the element of success in everything. It is the light that leads, and the strength that leads men on and up, in the great struggles of scientific pursuit, of professional labor. It robs endurance of difficulty and makes a pleasure of duty."

"To be a gentleman does not depend upon the tailor or the toilet. Good clothes are not good habits. A gentleman is just a gentle-man, — no more, no less; a diamond polished, that was first a diamond in the rough."

"If that impression does not remain on this intrepid and powerful people, into whose veins all nations pour their mingling blood, it will be our immense calamity. Public action, without it, will lose the dignity of consecration. Eloquence, without it, will miss what is loftiest, will give place to a careless and pulseless disquisition, or fall to the flatness of political slang. Life, without it, will lose its sacred and mystic charm. Society, without it, will fail of inspirations, and be drowned in an animalism whose rising tides will keep pace with its wealth."

"Just as soon as any conviction of important truth becomes central and vital, there comes the desire to utter it—a desire which is immediate and irresistible. Sacrifice is gladness, service is joy, when such an idea becomes a commanding power."

"To speak for Him will be our impulse. No matter how timid, nervous, self-diffident, we are in ourselves, as we touch His pierced and royal hand, we shall be instantly masterful and strong."

"Look back to the cross, and the disciples gazing on it in terror from afar, and then look around on the nations that are influenced by the faith that there centres — and note the change! Then take these elements, established in history, and calculate the orbit Christianity is to fill."

"The man who has given himself to his country loves it better; the man who has fought for his friend honors him more; the man who has labored for his community values more highly the interests he has sought to conserve; the man who has wrought and planned and endured for the accomplishment of God's plan in the world sees the greatness of it, the divinity and glory of it, and is himself more perfectly assimilated to it."

"Nature does not conquer the world to God. It never has. It never will. In America, with its vast abounding wealth, its grand expanse of prairie, its reach of river, and its exuberant productiveness, there is danger that our riches will draw us away from God, and fasten us to earth; that they will make us not only rich, but mean; not only wealthy, but wicked. The grand corrective is the cross of Christ, seen in the sanctuary where the life and light of God are exhibited, and where the reverberation of the echoes from the great white throne are heard."

"One must build to the praise of a Being above, to build the noblest memorial of himself. Then, Angelo may verily " hang the Pantheon in the air." Then the unknown builder, whose personality disappears in his work, may stand an almost inspired mediator between the upward-looking thought and the spheres overhead. Each line then leaps with a swift aspiration, as the vast structure rises, in nave and transept into pointed arch and vanishing spire. The groined roof grows dusky with majestic glooms; while, beneath, the windows flame, as with apocalyptic light of jewels. Angelic presences, sculptured upon the portal, invite the wayfarer, and wave before him their wings of promise. Within is a worship which incense only clouds, which spoken sermons only mar. The building itself becomes a worship, a Gloria in Excelsis, articulate in stone; the noblest tribute offered on earth, by any art, to Him from whom its impulse came, and with the ineffable majesty of whose spirit all skies are filled."

"I verily believe that the kingdom of God advances more on spoken words than it does on essays written and read; on words, that is, in which the present feeling and thought of the teaching mind break into natural and forceful expression."

"If any of you ever go into the pulpit "simply upon the cold legs of custom," be very careful to take a manuscript with you. But if you go to speak to the assembly because your mind is full of the truth, and you long to impart that truth to them, for their sake and for God's sake, — then charge your mind with it, and speak with all the force you can give it, without any notes."

"Whether you do your work with notes or without them, do it courageously, earnestly, with devotion; with a glad sense of the greatness of it, and a full consecration of every force and faculty to it."

"Always carry with you into the pulpit a sense of the immense consequences which may depend on your full and faithful presentation of the truth."

"God forgives; forgives not capriciously, but with wise, definite, Divine prearrangement; forgives universally, on the ground of an atonement, and on the condition of repentance and faith."

"No matter where the skeptical thought originates, or how it gets access to our minds, we see at once that it flattens the level of life and every aspiration. It makes our character less vigorous. The gospel is not simply a philosophy of religion or law of life, but it is an apocalypse, showing the heavens to our thought, and so bringing its spiritual benedictions to every heart and life."

"A good sonnet appears to be a confession-in a word either patently artificial,and then it is bad ,or good,then it sounds like autobiography."

"(On sexual intercourse:) The pleasure is momentary, the pains are infinite, and the posture is ridiculous."

"You are the stars and the world is watching you. By your presence you send a message to every village, every city, every nation. A message of hope. A message of victory. The right to play on any playing field? You have earned it. The right to study in any school? You have earned it. The right to hold a job? You have earned it. The right to anyone's neighbor? You have earned it."

"In ancient Rome, the gladiators went into the arena with these words on their lips: let me win, but if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt. Today, all of you young athletes are in the arena. Many of you will win. But even more important, I know you will be brave and bring credit to your parents and to your country. Let us begin the Olympics, thank you."

"Oh! for this baptism of fire! when every spoken word for Jesus shall be a thunderbolt, and every prayer shall bring forth a mighty flood."

"O! to abide ever in Christ— to know His fellowship, to keep our hearts resting upon His infinite love, and there to grow from spiritual infancy to the full stature in holiness and love and joy and peace. May this be your experience every day and hour, strong in Him, fruitful in Him, happy in Him, until with the crumbling of the tabernacle of clay, the fellowship is perfect in the house not made with hands, where we shall see Him as He is."

""I am trying to trust," said one to me this past week, who had heard the earth falling on the casket which held the cold form of the dearest human friend, " I am trying to trust," and so I have seen a bird with a broken wing trying to fly. When the heart is broken, all our trying will only increase our pain and unrest. But if, instead of trying to trust, we will press closer to the Comforter, and lean our weary heads upon His sufficient grace, the trust will come without our trying, and the promised "perfect peace" will calm every troubled wave of sorrow."

"Dear friends, have you begun to sing the "new song? " Loved ones are singing it in the heavenly home, and we may sing it here; and by and by we shall join them, gaze with them on the risen, glorified Lord, and our voices will mingle in the "new song" "unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood, to Him be glory and dominion for ever and ever.""

"If you and I shall, like the believing shepherds, watch and long for His appearing, one day we, too, shall hear a music grander and sweeter even than the song of angels, when the great Composer shall transpose all the strains of earth from the minor into the major, when the wail of nature shall give way to the glad harmony of the everlasting jubilee."

"The Lord's Supper! the marriage supper of the Lamb! There are vacant seats around the table here. Will there be dear ones missed at the table there?"

"Beloved, I congratulate you, that you are at the feast of redeeming love, that you know the riches of grace in Christ Jesus; but this is only the "early meal" (introductory feast); the " grand supper "is awaiting you, at the close of the day, in the palace of the King, where the fellowship will be perfect and eternal, where the table will be beyond all the mists and fogs of sin, where death never enters to disturb the festivities, and where we shall see the Lamb face to face. O! if the feast with Jesus here is so precious, what, what must heaven be!"

"This bread and wine are the simple but eloquent monument to the infinite love of the Son of God, around which we gather with tender, tearful gratitude, because He loved us'so, and because we know that our garlands of affection and consecration are pleasing to Him."

"A love to Christ which is so cowardly and selfish that it is unwilling to proclaim by a public confession its faith in Him who hung before all the world crucified for sinners, is a love which is hardly worth the name."