"Our virtues lose themselves in selfishness as rivers are lost in the sea."

—La Rochefoucauld 

Fairfield Porter on non-objective, or "abstract" painting:

"Critics who find non-objectivity anti-traditional, do not see that tradition is a process. It leads to non-objectivity like this: first, acceptance of nature as including the artist, who is, like one of the details of his painting, an equal part of creation; next, a questioning of what things are, of what we see; then a questioning of how we see; from here to a consideration of vision itself; then to the one who sees, the artist as part of a duality of nature and recipient; to the artist in introspection, and a denial of objectivity."

Colin Fleming on Schumann's Violin Concerto in D Minor, lost for a hundred years; "[it breaks] through the black and the haze to touch the palms of angels."