Albert Camus: “He Who Has Chosen the Fate of the Artist”

Photographers Unknown, He Who Has Chosen the Fate of the Artist

“And often he who has chosen the fate of the artist because he felt himself to be different soon realizes that he can maintain neither his art nor his difference unless he admits that he is like the others. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from.”
Albert Camus

Hermann Hesse: “Art Was a Union of the Father and Mother Worlds”

Photographer Unknown, (The Artist in His Studio)

“Art was a union of the father and mother worlds, of mind and blood. It might start in utter sensuality and lead to total abstraction; then again it might originate in pure concept and end in bleeding flesh. Any work of art that was truly sublime, not just a good juggler’s trick; that was filled with the eternal secret, like the master’s madonna; every obviously genuine work of art had this dangerous, smiling double face, was male-female, a merging of instinct and pure spirituality.”

-Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund