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"The enjoyment of the beautiful, the consolation that art affords, the
enthusiasm of the artist, which allows him to forget the pains of existence (such a faculty for enthusiasm being the only
advantage of genius over other men, by which he is compensated for the intensified sorrow that he will experience in
proportion to the clarity of his consciousness, as well as for the desert loneliness he experiences among people of a
different order of being), all this rests upon the fact that while the very being of life, the will, our sheer existence,
is an unremitting agony, part pitiful, part terrible, nevertheless, when viewed purely as Idea (as Image), and when
reproduced thus in art, free of its inherent torture, it affords a drama full of significance. This purely knowable
side of the world and its reproduction in art, one art or another, is the artist's element."
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Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung III,
52 (last paragraph); Werke, Vol. 3, pp. 119-20. |
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