“Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.”

— Northrop Frye

"Quotes", Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957), Polemical Introduction

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Northrop Frye 137

Canadian literary critic and literary theorist 1912–1991

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“Physics has in the main contented itself with studying the abridged edition of the book of nature.”

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“I like the description 'Physical art'. I think maybe art emerged when man first began to distinguish himself from nature. Art is part of himself, which he returns perhaps as an homage to the nature which he left. Of course, he never left nature. The rise of consciousness, perhaps... The main thing we believe, that separated us from not only animals but from the stones, is the fact that we are not stones, that we are not dogs. Now that is an assumption, perhaps it's a false assumption. But anyway, somehow I think one of the greatest functions of art is that man can feed back to his own consciousness through the knowledge that he is not a stone or not a dog.”

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“Mathematical physics represents the purest image that the view of nature may generate in the human mind; this image presents all the character of the product of art; it begets some unity, it is true and has the quality of sublimity; this image is to physical nature what music is to the thousand noises of which the air is full…”

Théophile de Donder (1872–1957) Belgian physicist

as quoted by Ilya Prigogine in his Autobiography http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1977/prigogine-autobio.html given at the occasion of Prigogine's 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

“There is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle.”

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“It is the nature of poetry to emphasize that the physical sounds of words come from a particular body, one at a time, in a particular order.”

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“Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.”

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Northrop Frye 137

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