
“An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.”
As quoted in Newsweek (16 May 1955) Variant translation: Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.
As quoted in "In conversation with Kate Bush" by Elio Iannacci in MacLeans (28 November 2016)
Context: The great thing about art on any level is that it can speak to all people if it’s achieved properly. When I’ve heard a piece of music or seen a painting that moves me, it gives me something. That’s such an incredibly special experience. I have intentions as a writer, but people — when they’re listening to a track — will take from it what they interpret. Sometimes people mishear my lyrics and think a song’s about something it isn’t. That doesn’t matter. If it speaks to them and they get something positive from it, it’s great.
“An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.”
As quoted in Newsweek (16 May 1955) Variant translation: Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.
“Cease speaking of enemies when an achievement can kindle a great light.”
Source: Leaves Of Morya's Garden (1924 - 1925), Book II : Illumination (1925), Ch. VII
Context: Cease speaking of enemies when an achievement can kindle a great light. Solitude will transmit the message better than the murmurs of crowds.
Linda Ronstadt, Arts Advocacy Day 2009 Congressional Hearing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLo6o_ayKZ0, 1 May 2009
The Spectrum of Consciousness (1993), Prologue, p. 6
Context: An argument can be legitimately sustained only if the participants are speaking about the same level. Argumentation would — for the most part — be replaced with something akin to Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity. Information from and about the different vibratory levels of bands of consciousness — although superficially as different as X-Rays and radio waves — would be integrated and synthesized into one spectrum, one rainbow. … Each band or level, being a particular manifestation of the spectrum, is what it is only by virtue of the other bands. The color blue is no less beautiful because it exists along side the other colors of a rainbow, and "blueness" itself depends upon the existence of the other colors, for if there were no color but blue, we would never be able to see it. In this type of synthesis, no approach, be it Eastern or Western, has anything to lose — rather, they all gain a universal context.
“Life may as properly be called an art as any other.”
Book I, Ch. 1
Amelia (1751)
The Art of Persuasion
Context: This art, which I call the art of persuading, and which, properly speaking, is simply the process of perfect methodical proofs, consists of three essential parts: of defining the terms of which we should avail ourselves by clear definitions, of proposing principles of evident axioms to prove the thing in question; and of always mentally substituting in the demonstrations the definition in the place of the thing defined.