Threshold

Famous quotes containing the word threshold:

    Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
    Susan Sontag (b. 1933)

    On the threshold of any wholly new and momentous devoted enterprise, the thousand ulterior intricacies and emperilings to which it must conduct; these, at the outset, are mostly withheld from sight.
    Herman Melville (1819–1891)

    One could love reason like an Encyclopaedist and still be favorably inclined toward mysticism. Throughout the ages, up to the eyes of van Gogh, when he looked at a coffee pot or a garden path, mysticism has expanded the human realm by all sorts of threshold experiences.
    Robert Musil (1880–1942)