We must recover the feelings and sensitivities which were once the common property of all civilized people. Those works of art, of literature, of music, which are pre-modern are of essential value for us. They can teach us, as will nothing we ourselves now produce, what nobility is, what virtue is, what honor and purity are, what sacrifice and loyalty are, what is worthy and what is not. Poetry, music, art, fiction, are not spiritual food, but are rather the milk and bread we need to strengthen ourselves to live on the meat of the spirit.

We have almost forgotten the sight and sound and feel of the sublime. To regain it we must return to a time when the gray, gritty moral fog had not yet settled over the world: a time when men’s sight was still clear and their souls still keen. If we cannot manage the uplands of the soul we shall hardly be able to touch the peaks of the spirit. Hardened by the din and moral cacophony of our world, our hearts are cold and our consciences numb. We are little moved by pity, honor, nobility, purity, because we seldom or never see them. We are even little moved by beauty, because we hardly know what it is. Like most value-terms, ‘beauty’ has become almost contentless, a word empty of any absolute meaning. Beauty is now whatever we like, or whatever someone tells us is beautiful. Art is whatever someone chooses to call art. There are, ostensibly, no longer any valid reasons for refusing to admit that a pile of rusty hubcaps and bent pipe is ‘art’ in the same way that Rembrandt is ‘art.’

laughwhileyoucanmonkey:

The soundtrack to every US election.

moldavia:

Yang Li S/S 2013

(Source: moldavia)

Maynard James Keenan

owls-love-tea:

Peter Pan, 1924

(Source: dodsrike)

sydneyflapper:

All the nice girls love a monocle!

and a top hat and cane.

figsandtea:

sarahreesbrennan:

UNDER PETTICOAT RULE! Anything but that. ;)

brb putting ‘under petticoat rule’ into some novel, somehow.

Women votes are worthless and would mean nothing! BUT IN SOME STATES MORE WOMEN THAN MEN WOULD VOTE AND IT WOULD BE PETTICOAT RULE AND CHAOS, CHAOS I SAY.

Amazing how right-wing rhetoric hasn’t changed much in 100 years.

Woman’s suffrage and the growth of the welfare state

(Source: bookalicious)

books0977:

Junge Dame mit Zeichengerät (Girl with a drawing instrument, the Countess Thekla Ludolf), 1816. Carl Christian Vogel von Vogelstein. Oil on panel.

For 70 years, it has hung in Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie. The Commission for Looted Art in Europe (CLAE) announced the restitution of the painting to its rightful owners, the heirs of the three Rosauer sisters of Vienna. 

Had been seized by the Nazis in 1938 and acquired in 1940 for the Dresden Museum by Hans Posse, Director of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie and head of Hitler’s Special Commission Linz, tasked with collecting works for Hitler’s planned museum in Linz, Austria.

steelylaceribbon:

Frederic Leighton, Light of the Harem, (~1880)

The American Adam, like his descendants today, sought to free himself from the past and to establish what Emerson called “an original relation to the universe.” Nineteenth-century writers and orators restated again and again, in a great variety of forms, Jefferson’s doctrine that the earth belongs to the living. The break with Europe, the abolition of primogeniture, and the looseness of family ties gave substance to their belief (even if was finally an illusion) that Americans, alone among the people of the world, could escape the entangling influence of the past. They imagined, according to Tocqueville, that “their whole destiny is in their own hands.