Edward Weston on the Most Fruitful Attitude Toward Life, Art, and Other People

“I feel towards persons as I do towards art, — constructively.”

Goethe believed that the only opinion worth voicing about the work and choices of others is one that springs from “a certain one-sided enthusiasm, or from a loving interest in the person and the work… All else is vanity.” A particularly corrosive species of vanity is the habit of self-comparison, which — depending on the degrees of narcissism and insecurity in the comparer — results either in self-inflation by diminishing the worth of the other or in d...