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# Weekend Words: View
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/weekend-words-view/
- Published: 2016-07-17T13:35:43.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:29:07.000Z
- Description: "The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them."
- Author: Weekend Editors
- Tags: Opinion, Weekend, Weekend Words, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:17 (2016, 2017, part 1)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2016/07/view.jpg)

Caspar David Friedrich, “The Wanderer above the Mists” (1817-18), oil on canvas, 95 x 75 cm, Kunsthalle, Hamburg (image via Web Gallery of Art)

The [multi-million dollar price tag](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/realestate/luxury/slow-times-on-billionaires-row-as-the-8-digit-boom-fizzles.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&ref=hyperallergic.com) for apartments with the highest views in New York City is falling.

> The heights charm us, but the steps do not; with the mountain in our view we love to walk the plains.  
>  
> **—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe**

> Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.  
>  
> **—Bertrand Russell**

> Nothing’s beautiful from every point of view.  
>  
> **—Horace**

> There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one.  
>  
> **—C.S. Lewis, *That Hideous Strength***

> An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.  
>  
> **—George Orwell**

> A writer must not shift your point of view.  
> And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction.  
>  
> **—William Safire, *William Safires’ Rules for Writers***

> The proper way to understand any social system was to view it from above.  
>  
> **—Eleanor Catton, *The Luminaries***

> The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.  
>  
> **—Mark Twain**

> I view my job as being someone who is supposed to piss people off. I don’t want to be just one-of-the-guys. I don’t want to be just a smiling face you see on television presenting some vapid kind of easily-digestible garbage. This is rock and roll. I want to be a rock and roll star! Rock and roll is about shaking things up, making people act and react. That’s what I do.  
>  
> **—Marilyn Manson**

> She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving – perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.”  
>  
> **—George Eliot, *Middlemarch***

> It was cold and barren. It was no longer the view that I remembered. The sunshine of her presence was far from me. The charm of her voice no longer murmured in my ear.  
>  
> **—Wilkie Collins, *The Woman in White***

> My father says that there is only one perfect view — the view of the sky straight over our heads, and that all these views on earth are but bungled copies of it.  
>  
> **—E.M. Forster, *A Room with a View***

> I don’t want someone shoving his views down my throat, unless they’re covered in a crunchy candy shell.  
>  
> **—Stephen Colbert**

> Nature will bear the closest inspection. She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.  
>  
> **—Henry David Thoreau**

> There are many paths to the top of the mountain, but the view is always the same.  
>  
> **—Chinese proverb**

> To hold the same views at forty as we did at twenty is to have been stupefied for a score of years, and take rank, not as a prophet, but as an unteachable brat, well birched and none the wiser.  
>  
> **—Robert Louis Stevenson, *Crabbed Age and Youth***