Quotes about art and science (page 8) | Quotes of famous people

“What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

“Patience is the art of hoping.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

La patience est l’art d’espérer.
Source: Reflections and Maxims (1746), p. 180.

“"Some people are desperately looking for scapegoats, they just don't want to see the truth!" (Jon commenting on the parents that blame music for the violence.)”

Jonathan Davis (1971) Heavy metal singer, frontman for Korn

“The music industry can make you feel like a prostitute.”

Jonathan Davis (1971) Heavy metal singer, frontman for Korn

“The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.”

Sun Tzu book The Art of War

(zh-TW) 孫子曰：國之上下，死生之地，存亡之道，不可不察也。
The Art of War, Chapter 1 · Detail Assessment and Planning

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

Sun Tzu (-543–-495 BC) ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher from the Zhou Dynasty

“In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good. So, too, it is better to recapture an army entire than to destroy it, to capture a regiment, a detachment or a company entire than to destroy them.”

Sun Tzu (-543–-495 BC) ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher from the Zhou Dynasty

Variant translations
It is best to keep one’s own state intact; to crush the enemy’s state is only second best.
Source: The Art of War, Chapter III · Strategic Attack

“The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.”

Sun Tzu (-543–-495 BC) ancient Chinese military general, strategist and philosopher from the Zhou Dynasty

Source: The Art of War, Chapter VIII · Variations and Adaptability

“The art of war is of vital importance to the State.”

Sun Tzu book The Art of War

The Art of War, Chapter I · Detail Assessment and Planning
Context: The art of war is of vital importance to the State. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.

“What of Art?
-It is a malady.
--Love?
-An Illusion.
--Religion?
-The fashionable substitute for Belief.
--You are a sceptic.
-Never! Scepticism is the beginning of Faith.
--What are you?
-To define is to limit.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“No one will be able to speak suitably and clearly about anything unless he has shaped his speech by some art, by imitation of the best.”

Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) German reformer

Source: Praise of Eloquence (1523), p. 62

“I do believe it is possible to create, even without ever writing a word or painting a picture, by simply molding one’s inner life. And that too is a deed.”

Etty Hillesum (1914–1943) Jewish diarist

“Mathematicians have constructed a very large number of different systems of geometry, Euclidean or non-Euclidean, of one, two, three, or any number of dimensions. All these systems are of complete and equal validity. They embody the results of mathematicians' observations of their reality, a reality far more intense and far more rigid than the dubious and elusive reality of physics. The old-fashioned geometry of Euclid, the entertaining seven-point geometry of Veblen, the space-times of Minkowski and Einstein, are all absolutely and equally real. …There may be three dimensions in this room and five next door. As a professional mathematician, I have no idea; I can only ask some competent physicist to instruct me in the facts.
The function of a mathematician, then, is simply to observe the facts about his own intricate system of reality, that astonishingly beautiful complex of logical relations which forms the subject-matter of his science, as if he were an explorer looking at a distant range of mountains, and to record the results of his observations in a series of maps, each of which is a branch of pure mathematics. …Among them there perhaps none quite so fascinating, with quite the astonishing contrasts of sharp outline and shade, as that which constitutes the theory of numbers.”

G. H. Hardy (1877–1947) British mathematician

"The Theory of Numbers," Nature (Sep 16, 1922) Vol. 110 https://books.google.com/books?id=1bMzAQAAMAAJ p. 381

“I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.”

G. H. Hardy book A Mathematician's Apology

Source: A Mathematician's Apology (1941)

“A painter makes patterns with shapes and colours, a poet with words. A painting may embody an ‘idea’, but the idea is usually commonplace and unimportant. In poetry, ideas count for a good deal more; but, […] the importance of ideas in poetry is habitually exaggerated: '… Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.' [In poetry, ] the poverty of the ideas seems hardly to affect the beauty of the verbal pattern.”

G. H. Hardy book A Mathematician's Apology

A Mathematician's Apology (1941)

“I play the notes as they are written, but it is God who makes the music.”

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) German late baroque era composer

“Music [is] a science peculiarly productive of a pleasure that no state of life, publick or private, secular or sacred; no difference of age or season; no temper of mind or condition of health exempt from present anguish; nor, lastly, distinction of quality, renders either improper, untimely, or unentertaining.”

Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) English naval administrator and member of parliament

Letter to the Master of University College, Oxford; published in J. R. Tanner (ed.) Private Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers of Samuel Pepys, 1679-1703 (1926) p. 109. (1700)

“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse — and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness —
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.
FitzGerald's first edition (1859)
A book, a woman, and a flask of wine:
The three make heaven for me; it may be thine
Is some sour place of singing cold and bare —
But then, I never said thy heaven was mine.
As translated by Richard Le Gallienne (1897)
Give me a flagon of red wine, a book of verses, a loaf of bread, and a little idleness. If with such store I might sit by thy dear side in some lonely place, I should deem myself happier than a king in his kingdom.
As translated by Justin McCarthy (1888).
The Rubaiyat (1120)

“We are thrilled that this work will return to India as a fitting tribute to the artist and a celebration of art from this region.”

S. H. Raza (1922–2016) Indian artist

By Hugo Weihe, Christie's International Director of Asian Art and Yamini Mehta quoted in "Raza's painting sold at record price".

“The influence of my art is expressed in the movement of the Constructivists, of which I am the founder – Tatlin.”

Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953) Russian artist

Quoted from a biographical note written by Tatlin in 1929, published in Tatlin', Weingarten; Kunstverlag Weingarten, 1987), p. 328; as quoted by Vasilii Rakitin, in The great Utopia - The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932; Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1992, p. 34
Quotes, 1926 - 1954