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...those rare moments in life when physical well-being prepares the way for calm of soul, and the universe seems before your eyes to have reached a perfect equilibrium; then the soul, half asleep, hovers between the present and the future, between the real and the possible, while with natural beauty all around and the air tranquil and mild, at peace with himself in the midst of universal peace, man listens to the even beating of his arteries that seems to him to mark the passage of time flowing drop by drop through eternity.

De Tocqueville - Journey to America p318

The difference between a pure craft, like carpentry, and art is that when the carpenter starts work he knows exactly what the finished product will be, whereas the artist never knows just what he is going to make until he has made it. But, like the carpenters, all he can or should consciously think about is how to make it as well as possible, so that it may become a durable object,

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permanently "on hand" in the world.

WH Auden. Forwards and Afterwords p433

Today in the so-called "free" societies of the West, the most widespread error is the exact opposite of Plato's, namely, to take political action as the model of artistic fabrication. To do this is to reduce to an endless series of momentary and arbitrary "happenings," and to produce in artists and public alike a conformism to the tyranny of the passing moments which is far more enslaving, for more destructive of integrity and originality, than any thoughtless copying of the past.

Auden p435

"Exiled are we. Were exiles born. The 'far away,' language of desert, language of ocean, language of sky, as of the unfathomable worlds that lie between the apple and the eye, these are the only words we learn to say. Each morning we devour the unknown. Each day we find, and take, and spill, or spend, or lose, a sunflower splendor of which none knows the source."

Conrad Aiken, A letter from Li Po