people-from-calabria

"England is great in the esteem to which it upholds the law, contrary to that popular proverb "perfida Albion," which is now proved wrong."

"Joachim cannot be reduced to that of an outstanding scholar or researcher, but to his adherence to the faith, understood and expressed ascetically."

"We make every effort to indicate true devotion to Mary, that which leads to Christ. And I think this teaching is amply received. As for the rest, I think these things need time to settle, a period of waiting, and great patience. The supernatural, especially in a world that doesn't believe in God and that has lost values, cannot be demonstrated if it doesn't bear fruits."

"We are all invited to a concrete commitment against the expansion of initiatives that refer to the world of the occult. Carry out an appropriate sensitization in parishes through the parish priests, avoiding counterproductive fears and psychosis and useless alarmism."

"We are all called to be holy right where we are, amid everyday realities, despite our weaknesses and the difficulties we may face. By living in this way we can change the world."

"Growth in communion justifies the joy in Christians to be able to elevate a sincere thanksgiving to God, the concreteness of permanent divisions."

"Today the Catholic Church in Turkey is called to move from an attitude of a Church with presence to a Church of witness: a Church which reflects on the meaning of its presence in Turkey."

"People for whom it has become a habit — and, unfortunately, they are increasingly numerous in the context of our consumerist pseudo-civilization — to spend Sunday afternoon in these shopping centers, now find the opportune possibility of being able to enjoy the wealth of spiritual values. Our task is to go beyond the boundaries of ordinary pastoral care."

"This tale is not true: you [Helen} did not even board the well-benched ships, and you did not go to the citadel of Troy."

"All the mistakes I did in my life, I like to keep them private."

"Intelligent men are not ashamed to bring out their feminine side."

"Wealth is a wonderful ticket to freedom."

"In Rome they dress very well. In Milan, they dress more bourgeoisly. But the most avant-garde city... is Naples. The Neapolitan underground youth can easily be compared to a city like London."

"I’m sorry, counselor, I’d rather blow the goddamn case."

"[A]udacious Titan of the modern age, possessing essentially a combative intellect; a poet and philosopher militant, who stood alone making war upon the authority of Aristotle in science, of Machiavelli in statecraft, and of Petrarch in art."

"I learn more from the anatomy of an ant or a blade of grass...than from all the books which have been written since the beginning of time. This is so, since I have begun...to read the book of God...the model according to which I correct the human books which have been copied badly and arbitrarily and without attention to the things that are written in the original book of the Universe."

"If You return to earth, come armed Lord, because enemies are preparing other crosses —not Turks, not Jews—but those of Your own kingdom"

"The world is the book where the eternal Wisdom wrote its own concepts"

"Boccioni, Russolo and I all met in the Porta Vittoria café [in Milan, Italy], close to where we all lived, and we enthusiastically outlined a draft of our appeal [the Manifesto of Futurist Painters, late February, 1910]. The final version was somewhat laborious; we worked on it all day, all three of us and finished it that evening with Marinetti and the help of w:Decio Cinti, the group's secretary."

"Boccioni and I were swiftly persuaded that with this show in Paris we were staking our all; for a flop would have meant kissing our fine aspirations goodbye. This is why we decided to go to Paris, to see what the art situation there was like."

"This bubbling and whirling of forms and lights, composed of sounds, noises, and smells has been partly achieved by me [= Carra,] in my 'Anarchical funeral' [the painting, Carra painted ca 1910-1911].. ..by Boccioni in his 'States of Minds' and 'Forces of a Street' [both paintings Boccioni painted in 1911], by Russolo in 'Rebellion' (1911) and Severini in 'Pan-Pan' [the first version, which Severini painted in 1909-1911], paintings which were violently discussed at our first Paris [Futurist] exhibition in 1912."

"They did not want anything to do with me in Paris and they [the younger Futurist artists Boccioni and Gino Severini ] were right: they have gone much further than I, but I will work and I too will progress."

"In the brief life span of the Italian Futurist movement, the short-lived Umberto Boccioni was a blazing comet.. .Boccioni was a fiery theoretician of the movement, drafting two Futurist Manifestos in 1910 and 1912 that exalted the force and energy of contemporary life. They called for an art that glorified speed, violence and the machine age, one that above all reflected the dynamism of an engine-driven civilization."

"Boccioni's gift was to bring a fresh eye to reality in ways that, we now recognise, defined the nature of the modern movement in the visual arts and literature, too"

"..the moving whirlwind of modernity through its crowds, its cars, its telegraph poles, its bare, working-class neighbourhoods, its noises, its squeals, its violence, its cruelty, its cynicism, and its relentless pushiness."

"..a member of anarchist and revolutionary circles, attracted in turn by violent action and by dream, before resolving to dedicate him to painting."

"While the impressionists make a table to give one particular moment and subordinate the life of the table to its resemblance to this moment, we synthesize every moment (time, place, form, color-tone) and thus build the table."

"A horse in movement is not a stationary horse that moves but a horse in a movement, which is to say something other, that should be conceived and expressed as something completely different. It is a question of conceiving objects in movement over and above the motion they carry within themselves. That is, a question of finding a form which is the expression of this new absolute.. .A question of studying the aspects that life has taken on in haste and in consequent simultaneity."

"The harmony of the lines and folds of modern dress works upon our sensitiveness with the same emotional and symbolical power as did the nude upon the sensitiveness of the old masters."

"..the characteristic motion peculiar to the object (absolute motion), with the transformations the object undergoes in its shifting in relation to the environment, mobile or immobile (relative motion; both motions should be conceived in art)"

"We wanted a complementarity of form and colour. So we made a synthesis of analyses of colour (the divisionism of Seurat, Signac and Cross) and analyses of form (of Picasso and Georges Braque)."

"Balla [his former art teacher in Italy] flabbergasted us because, not content with being involved in a Futurist campaign, as you can well imagine him doing, he launched himself into a complete transformation. He rejected all his works and all his working methods. He started work on four pictures of movement (one painting was his 'Girl running on a balcony'), which were still realist but incredible ahead of their time.. ..He confided this to w:Aldo Palazzeschi: 'They (Balla's former - so much younger pupils Boccioni and Severini] did not want anything to do with me in Paris and they were right: they have gone much further than I, but I will work and I too will progress.'"

"From our very first conversation in the Closerie des Lilas the day after the opening of the first exhibition of Futurist painting [in Paris, February 1912] I noticed that Fernand Léger was one of the most gifted and promising Cubists.. .Léger's article ('Les origins de la peinture et sa valeur representative', Mai 1913) is a true act of Futurist faith which give us great satisfaction - all the more so since the author is kind enough to mention us."

"No one can any longer believe that an object ends where another begins."

"The first painting to appear with an affirmation of simultaneity was mine and had the following title: 'Simultaneous visions', [Boccioni painted in 1911]. It was exhibited in the galerie Bernheim in Paris, and in the same exhibition my Futurist painter friends also appeared with similar experiments in simultaneity."

"Not only have we radically abandoned the motive fully developed according to its determined and, therefore, artificial equilibrium, but we suddenly and purposely intersect each motif with one or more other motifs of which we never give the full development but merely the initial, central, of final notes.. .We thus arrived at what we call the painting of states of mind."

"[the Cubist painters who] ..continued to paint objects motionless, frozen, and all the static aspects of Nature; they worship the traditionalism of w:Poussin, of w:Ingres, of Corot, ageing and petrifying their art with an obstinate attachment to the past, which to our eyes remains totally incomprehensible."

"Let us explain again by examples. In painting a person on a balcony, seen from inside the room do not limit the scene to what the square of the window renders visible; we try to render the sum total of visual sensations which the person on the balcony has experienced; the sun-baked throng in the street, the double row of houses which stretch to right and left, the beflowered balconies etc. This implies the simultaneity of the ambient, and, therefore, the dislocation and the dislocation and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic and independent from one another. In order to make the spectator live in the center of the picture, as we express it in our manifesto the picture must be the synthesis of what one remembers and what one sees. You must render the invisible which stirs lives beyond intervening obstacles, what we have on the right, or the left, or behind us, and not merely the small square of life artificially compressed, as it were, by the wings of a stage set. We have declared in our manifesto that what must be rendered is the dynamic sensation, that is to say, the particular rhythm of each object, its inclination, its movement, or more exactly, its interior force."

"..if the objects will be mathematical values, the ambient in which they live will be a particular rhythm in the emotion which surrounds them. The graphic translation of this rhythm will be a state of form, a state of color, each of which will give back to the spectator the 'state of mind' which produced it.."

"It is also true that without flashes of the absolute, which are granted to only a few, humanity would proceed in the dark, indeed it would not exist, because it would not acknowledge itself to itself! And as far as I know the flash as never preceded by explanations or preambles, and only a very small mind.. ..could fail to understand that eternal aspiration absolute and that the work is the relative, that to create is already to circumscribe; that to comment is to circumscribe the circumscribed, is to subdivide the divided; is to reduce to minimum terms, is to annihilate."

"I work a lot but don't seem to finish. That is, I hope what I am doing means something because I don't know what I am doing. It's strange and terrible but I feel calm. Today I worked non-stop for six hours on a sculpture and I don't know what the result is.. .Planes upon planes, sections of muscles, of a face and then? And the total effect? Does what I create live? Where will I end up?"

".. the number of the engine [of the train], its profile shown in the upper part of the picture, its wind-cutting fore-part in the center, symbolical of parting, indicates the features of the scene that remain indelibly impressed upon the mind [of the viewer]."

"..since our past is the greatest in the world and thus all the more dangerous for our life!.. .We must smash, demolish and destroy our traditional harmony, which makes us fall into a 'gracefullness' created by timid and sentimental cubs [cubs refers sneering to the Cubists ]."

"Sculpture is based on the abstract of the planes and volumes that determine the forms, not their figurative value."

"..Is it indisputable that several aesthetic declarations of our French comrades (the Cubists) display a sort of masked academicism. It is not, indeed, a return to the Academy to declare that the subject, in painting, has a perfectly insignificant value?.. .To paint from the posing model as an absurdity, and an act of mental cowardice, even if the model be translated upon the picture in linear, spherical and cubic forms.."

"If we paint the phases of a riot, the crowd bustling with uplifted fists and the noisy onslaughts of cavalry are translated upon the canvas in sheaves of lines corresponding with all the conflicting forces, following the general laws of violence of the picture.. .These force-lines must encircle and involve the spectator so that he will in a manner be forced to struggle himself with the persons in the picture."

"Get all the information you can about the Cubists, and about Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Go to Kahnweilers' (Paris art gallery). And if he's got photos of recent works – produced after I have left -, buy one or two. Bring us [the Futurists in Italy, like Boccioni himself] back all the information you can get."

"With this new tendency [of Orphism] the Cubists dubbed Impressionism of forms according to Appolinaire, is entering a final and glorious phase: ..Orphism, pure painting, simultaneity. And there you have it, as many obvious plagiarisms of what has formed, from its earliest appearances, the essence of Futurist painting and sculpture.. ..But we insist on sorting things out. Orphism [initiated by former Cubist artist Robert Delaunay as an colorful alternative for strict Cubism ], let us say it right away, is just an elegant masquerade of the basic principles of Futurist painting. This new trend simply illustrates the profit that our French colleagues managed to driver from our first Futurist exhibition in Paris."

"All shadows have their light, each shadow being an autonomous unit forming a new individuality with its own chiaroscuro: it is no longer a form that is half-shadow, half-light, as hat hitherto been the case."

"A time will come when the picture will no longer be enough. Its immobility will become an archaism with the vertiginous movement of human life. The eye of man will perceive colours as feelings within itself. Multiplied colours will not need form to be understood and paintings will be swirling musical compositions of great coloured gases, which, on the scene of a free horizon, will move and electrify the complex soul of a crowd that we cannot yet conceive of."