“Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.”

Source: The Dance of Life http://www.gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300671.txt (1923), Ch. 2

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H. Havelock Ellis31

British physician, writer, and social reformer 1859–1939

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"The Obscurity of the Poet", p. 15
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“Movement is the translation of life and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of life, because it moves.”

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) French painter and sculptor

Letter to Sophie Brzeska-Savage Messiah By H S (Jim) Ede Heinimann (1931)

“Movement is the translation of life, and if art depicts life, movement should come into art, since we are only aware of living because it moves.”

Arshile Gorky (1904–1948) Armenian-American painter

Source: posthumous, Astract Expressionist Painting in America, p. 64, in an unpublished letter of Gorky

“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarates, the performing arts (such as acting and dance) entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning in into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat— some because they use visible and hence vital formulas, others because they live from human life itself.
This isn't the case with literature. Literature simulates life. A novel is a story of what never was, a play is a novel without narration. A poem is the expression of ideas or feelings a language no one uses, because no one talks in verse.”

Fernando Pessoa book The Book of Disquiet

Source: The Book of Disquiet

“She was the most painful, most glorious dance of his life”

Anne Bishop (1955) American fiction writer

Source: Heir to the Shadows

“No new artistic system will withstand the pressure of a growing new culture until the very foundation of Art will be erected on the real laws of life.
Until all artists will say with us…
All is a fiction… only life and its laws are authentic and in life only the active is beautiful and wise and strong and right, for life does not know beauty as an aesthetic measure… efficacious existence is the highest beauty.
Life knows neither good nor bad nor justice as a measure of morals… need is the highest and most just of all morals.
Life does not know rationally abstracted truths as a measure of cognizance, deed is the highest and surest of truths.
Those are the laws of life. Can art withstand these laws if it is built on an abstraction, on mirage, and fiction?…”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

Quoted in: Naum Gabo, Michael Compton (1987) Naum Gabo: sixty years of constructivism. p. 8
1918 - 1935, Realistic Manifesto, 1920

“Our most important aim is to develop definite personalities in our cartoon characters. We don't want them to be just shadows, for merely as moving figures they provoke no emotional response from the public. We invest them with life a caricature of life.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

Walt Disney interview, New York Times, (March 1938).

“Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.”

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet

“Life, even the hardest life, is the most beautiful, wonderful, and miraculous treasure in the world.”

Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968) American sociologist

Source: The Ways and Power of Love (1954), p. xi

“Remember that the most beautiful things in life are often the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.”

John Ruskin book The Stones of Venice

Volume I, chapter II, section 17.
The Stones of Venice (1853)
Variant: Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.
Context: You were made for enjoyment, and the world was filled with things which you will enjoy, unless you are too proud to be pleased with them, or too grasping to care for what you cannot turn to other account than mere delight. Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless: peacocks and lilies, for instance.

“Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.”

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H. Havelock Ellis31

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