Howard Nemerov Quotes

Sadness is also a kind of defence.

We should always bear in mind that numbers represent a simplification of reality.

Words reduce reality to something the human mind can grasp, which isn’t very much.

I had a wall around me and a lot of fantasy locked inside.

The longer you look at an object, the more abstract it becomes, and, ironically, the more real.

Simplicity, clarity, singleness: These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation.

My favorite thing to do is still to go back to Peoria, go to my cabin and hunt with the boys. This is a great lifestyle, don't get me wrong. But fun for me is going back with my buddies I grew up with.

This sounds an extraordinary statement to make, but in fact all truth is very ordinary.

The imagination is a pretty precious source of protection.

It would be wonderful if the public sector were always great, or always terrible; or if the private sector were always great, or always terrible. Alas, reality is more complicated than comforting caricatures. Governments fail, and corporations fail.

The analysis of the thing is not the thing itself.

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion that you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all thee boys’ philosophies – – these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.

I have created a shell around me, in the good and the bad moments.

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.

Fear is a cloak which old men huddle about their love, as if to keep it warm.

The inner defenses are unconscious. They consist of a kind of magic aura which the mind builds around cherished belief. Arguments which penetrate into the magic aura are not dealt with rationally but by a specific type of pseudo-reasoning. Absurdities and contradictions are made acceptable by specious rationalizations.

We all create stories to protect ourselves.

Parts exist only for purposes of figuring and describing, and as we figure the world out we become confused if we do not remember this all the time.

I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.

My pictures are devoid of objects; like objects, they are themselves objects. This means that they are devoid of content, significance or meaning, like objects or trees, animals, people or days, all of which are there without a reason, without a function and without a purpose. This is the quality that counts. Even so, there are good and bad pictures.

Whatever is most abstract may perhaps be the summit of reality.

Despite all that education and experience can do, I retain a certain level of unsophistication that I cannot eradicate and that my friends find amusing. In fact, I think I sometimes detect conspiratorial plottings among my friends to protect me against my own lack of sophistication. I don't mind. I suspect that I am never quite as unsophisticated as they think I am, but I don't mind.

Of course, any simplification runs the risk of mutilating reality; but it helps us establish perspectives.

Nothing is easier than to simplify life and them make a philosophy about it. The trouble is that the resulting philosophy is true only of that simplified life.

To make abstractions hold in reality is to destroy reality.