Quotes about art and science

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“Modern paintings are like women, you'll never enjoy them if you try to understand them. ”

Freddie Mercury (1946–1991) British singer, songwriter and record producer

“The music is not in the notes,
but in the silence between.”

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) Austrian Romantic composer

“My mother was mistrustful of the education system, so it was all right with her if we didn't go to school. She was taking us to Truffaut films, and I was busy getting through a Knut Hamsun book or something, so she felt satisfied we weren't wasting our lives watching The Brady Bunch. Because of where we lived, I would've had to go to Belmont High, so the year I was supposed to start high school I tried to get into the High School for the Performing Arts, which had just opened. I sent them a tape of me playing blues guitar and some short stories I'd written, but they didn't want me.”

Beck (1970) American Musician (b.1970)

LA Weekly, 23 June 2000

“I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of stomach cancer. I decided that nobody should suffer that much.”

Gertrude B. Elion (1918–1999) American biochemist and pharmacologist

Gertrude B. Elion, Quotes at goodreads.com https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7793243.Gertrude_B_Elion

“We must not forget that when radium was discovered no one knew that it would prove useful in hospitals. The work was one of pure science. And this is a proof that scientific work must not be considered from the point of view of the direct usefulness of it. It must be done for itself, for the beauty of science, and then there is always the chance that a scientific discovery may become like the radium a benefit for humanity.”

Marie Curie (1867–1934) French-Polish physicist and chemist

Lecture at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York (14 May 1921)

“Sure, Kill Bills a violent movie. But it's a Tarantino movie. You don't go to see Metallica and ask the fuckers to turn the music down.”

Quentin Tarantino (1963) American film director, screenwriter, producer, and actor

Quentin Tarantino on media criticisms of violence in his movies.

“Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.”

Egon Schiele (1890–1918) austrian painter

“To be white, red, yellow, or black is to be a painter. Today it is not sufficient for the painter to think of colour; he should be colour, feed on colour and transform himself into painting. That is the essential thing. To feel like colour means to carry within oneself the entire range of colours, not as a treasure, but as a trust.”

Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) Dutch architect, painter, draughtsman and writer

Quote in Van Doesburg's article 'Elementarism', as cited in De Stijl – Van Doesburg Issue, January 1932, pp. 17–19
1926 – 1931

“Music touches us emotionally, where words alone can't.”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

“Politics is a great art. It succeeds at convincing the people that they have to pay for what has been stolen from them.”

Andrzej Majewski (1966) Polish writer and photographer

Aphorisms. Magnum in Parvo (2000)

“Instead of supposing that a work of art must be something that all can behold—a poem, a painting, a book, a great building—consider making your own life a work of art. You have yourself to begin with, and a time of uncertain duration to work on it. You do not have to be what you are, and even though you may be quite content with who you are, it will not be hard for you to think of something much greater that you might become. It need not be something spectacular or even something that will attract notice from others. What it will be is a kind of excellence that you project for yourself, and then attain—something that you can take a look at, with honest self-appraisal, and be proud of.”

Richard Taylor (philosopher) (1919–2003) American philosopher, born 1919

Source: Restoring Pride: The Lost Virtue of Our Age (1995), p. 64

“I have no sense of pleasure or pain, and I stay as I have always been. Sometimes He draws me outside, and sometimes He takes me inside and I am completely withdrawn. I am nobody, all of my actions are done by him and not by me.”

Sri Anandamoyi Ma (1896–1982) Hindu saint

Gopinath Kaviraj, Sri Sri Ma Anandamayi: Upadesa O Prasnottara, p. 1
By followers

“Education and training for all children to be equal in opportunity in all schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions of training in the professions and vocations in life; to be regulated on the capacity of children to learn, and not on the ability of parents to pay the costs. Training for life's work to be as much universal and thorough for all walks of life as has been the training in the arts of killing.”

Huey Long (1893–1935) American politician, Governor of Louisiana, and United States Senator

Number 7 in the sum and substance of the Share our Wealth program (1935); quoted in Hugh Davis Graham, Huey Long (1970), p. 74.

“Mr. President, I am not undertaking to answer the charge that I am ignorant. It is true. I am an ignorant man. I have had no college education. I have not even had a high school education. But the things that takes me far in politics is that I do not have to color what comes into my mind and into my heart. I say it unvarnished. I say it without veneer. I have not the learning to do otherwise, and therefore my ignorance is often not detected.

I know the hearts of the People because I have not colored my own. I know when I am right in my own conscience. I do not talk one way in the cloakroom and another way out here. I do not talk one way back there in the hills of Louisiana and another way here in the Senate.

I have one language. Ignorant as it is, it is the universal language within the sphere in which I operate. Its simplicity gains pardon for my lack of letters and education.

Nonetheless my voice will be the same as it has been. Patronage will not change it. Fear will not change it. Persecution will not change it. It cannot be changed while people suffer. The only way it can be changed is to make the lives of these people decent and respectable. No one will ever hear political opposition out of me when that is done.”

Huey Long (1893–1935) American politician, Governor of Louisiana, and United States Senator

Huey Long, U.S. Senate floor speech, March 5, 1935

“When I got my first commission after Habitat, for a few weeks I couldn't draw.”

Moshe Safdie (1938) Israeli-Canadian architect

CBC television interview, used for many years in CBC Montreal's sign-on montage

“If Van Eyck’s patrons had all been Buddhists he would neither have painted the Adoration of the Lamb nor, for that matter, the Hunting of the Otter, but though the fact that he did is therefore trivially connected with the civilization in which he worked, there is no need to place these works on the periphery of the Hegelian wheel and look for the governing cause that explains both otter hunting and piety in the particular form they took in the early decades of the fifteenth century, and which is also expressed in Van Eyck’s new technique.”

Ernst Gombrich (1909–2001) art historian

In Search of Cultural History (1969)

“Peace is the music of every soul. Our glory lies in understanding, listening and honoring that music.”

Amit Ray (1960) Indian author

Walking the Path of Compassion (2015)

“Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Source: Attributed in posthumous publications, Einstein and the Poet (1983), p. 94
Context: Religion and science go together. As I've said before, science without religion is lame and religion without science is blind. They are interdependent and have a common goal—the search for truth. Hence it is absurd for religion to proscribe Galileo or Darwin or other scientists. And it is equally absurd when scientists say that there is no God. The real scientist has faith, which does not mean that he must subscribe to a creed. Without religion there is no charity. The soul given to each of us is moved by the same living spirit that moves the universe.

“I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Ich habe keine besondere Begabung, sondern bin nur leidenschaftlich neugierig. <br class="br">Letter to Carl Seelig http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Seelig (11 March 1952), Einstein Archives 39-013 <br class="br">1950s

“Because it’s the music that engenders the expression, artistry, and technique that is figure skating, I think that music and figure skating are essentially one and the same. [...] It’s my raison d'être. It’s the reason I skate.”

Yuzuru Hanyu (1994) Japanese figure skater (1994-)

Other quotes, 2020
Original: (ja) そこに音楽があるから、フィギュアスケートっていう表現だったり、芸術だったり、技術っていうものがそこに生まれてくるのであって、音楽とフィギュアスケートっていうのがほぼイコールだと僕は思ってます。で、僕にとっては… なんて言うか、生きがいです。フィギュアスケートをやる理由です。
Source: Hanyu in an interview from 2019 about the meaning of the music, aired 28 March 2020 in フィギペディア～2019-2020シーズン特別編 (Figurepedia 2019-2020 season special edition) on TV Asahi.