Quotes about art
page 28

“To show that this end [of art by its dissolution into real life] is only a beginning, it is essential that.... the series of galleries [of the future museum of modern art] be followed by a room in which painting and sculpture will be realized by the interior itself.... demonstrating that what is lost for art is gained for life. This room could therefore be designed for use as a lecture room, a restaurant.... as a bar with an American jazz band.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Mondrian's reaction on a questionnaire (c. 1931?)
Quote of Mondrian, as cited in Mondrian, -The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 166
1930's

Life, Future, Painting

“The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.”

Dale Carnegie (1888–1955) American writer and lecturer

As quoted in Art Smart (2007) by Alan Bryce

Pleasure

“No age can have everthing and in material ways ours is more fortunate than any preceding one. Our ancestors appear to have mastered the art of living better than we are able to when an easy conscience, largely due to the unshaken faith of the time, left a marging of spiritual energy with which to enjoy life.”

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) English author and poet

May Chapter The Peverel Papers - A yearbook of the countryside ed Julian Shuckburgh Century Hutchinson 1986
The Peverel Papers

Life, Age, Faith, Way

““Truth” is the reigning sacred object of the scholarly community, as “art” is for literary/artistic communities; these are simultaneously their highest cognitive and moral categories, the locus of highest value, by which all else is judged.”

Randall Collins (1941) American sociologist

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), p. 19

Truth, Communication

“The belief that science destroys culture is sometimes supported by historical statements that the arts have flourished only when the sciences have been neglected. This thesis is… directly contrary to history… [I]n the great age of Greece, art and science penetrate one another more closely than in any modern age. …The example of these men in science as much as in art set the modern world afire in the Renaissance. And the type and symbol of Renaissance man… remains Leonardo da Vinci, painter, sculptor, mathematician, and engineer. No man has shown more strikingly the universality and the unity of the intellect.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"Sense and Sensibility"
The Common Sense of Science (1951)

Men, Age, World, History

“It is impossible to understand Art and the glory of its history without avowing religious spirituality and the mythical roots that lead us to the very reason of being of the artistic phenomenon. Without the one or the other there would be no Egyptian pyramids, nor those of ancient Mexico. Would the Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals have existed?”

Luis Barragán (1902–1988) Mexican architect

In his acceptance of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, 1980

History, Understanding

“Art is a refining and evocative translation of the materials of the world.”

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) American writer

Black Poetry Writing (1975)

World

“During the four hundred years of Han supremacy the march of civilization went steadily forward. Paper and ink were invented, and also the camel's-hair brush, both of which gave a great impetus to the arts of writing and painting.”

Herbert Giles (1845–1935) British sinologist and diplomat

The Civilization of China https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2076/2076-h/2076-h.htm (1911), p. 37

Painting

“Let not thy peace depend on the tongues of men; for whether they judge well of thee or ill, thou art not on that account other than thyself. Where are true peace and true glory? Are they not in God?”

Isabella Fyvie Mayo (1843–1914) Scottish poet, novelist, reformer

Reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 448.

Men, God, Peace, Dependency

“The Futurists were the first painters, poets, and architects who exalted modern work with their art—
they painted speeding automobiles—
they painted lamps bursting with light—
they painted steaming locomotives and swift bicyclists—
the Futurists stylized their compositions, adopting a violently colored look; with synoptic and geometric shapes they multiplied and decomposed the rhythms of objects and landscapes in order to increase their dynamic qualities and to give an effective rendering of their swift ideas, the states of mind, their conceptions.”

Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) Italian painter, writer, sculptor and graphic designer

Depero (1931) "Futurism and Adverticing Art"; Republished in: Futurism : an anthology http://modernistarchitecture.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/ebooksclub-org__futurism__an_anthology__henry_mcbride_series_in_modernism_.pdf. edited by Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, (2011), p. 290

Color, Idea, Light, Painting

“Art is not like other culture because its success is not made by its audience. The public fill concert halls and cinemas everyday, we read novels by the millions, and buy records by the billions. 'We the people' affect the making and quality of most of our culture, but not our art.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Wall and Piece (2007)

People, Reading, Success

“The general conception here maintained is not new; it is one already familiar from the works of Coleridge, Croce and many others; it is the view that art is at bottom neither more nor less than imagination.”

R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943) British historian and philosopher

Source: Outlines of a Philosophy of Art, 1925, p. 3

Imagination

“T is said that absence conquers love;
But oh believe it not!
I’ve tried, alas! its power to prove,
But thou art not forgot.”

Frederick William Thomas

Absence conquers Love.

Love

“Art comes from the world, belongs to it, can never escape from it.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

World

“Is there not
An art, a music, and a stream of words
That shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?”

William Wordsworth The Recluse

The Recluse, l. 401 (1805).

Life, Music

“Instead of copying Nature, we [ Cubists ] create a 'milieu', of our own, wherein our sentiment can work itself out through a juxtaposition of colors. It is hard to explain it, but it may perhaps be illustrated by analogy of literature and music. Your [ Gelett Burgess is American] Edgar Poe did not attempt to reproduce Nature realistically. Some phase of life suggested an emotion, as that of horror in 'The Fall of the House of Ushur.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

That subjective idea he translated into art. He made a composition of it. Quote of Metzinger in 'The Wild Men of Paris', by Gelett Burgess https://monoskop.org/images/f/f3/Burgess_Gelett_1910_The_Wild_Men_of_Paris.pdf, in 'The Architectural Record, Vol XXVII, May 1910, p. 413

Life, Music, Color, Literature

“The shape and direction of video art's accelerated growth, since virtual nonexistence in the mid-'60s up to the present, has been influenced primarily by the priorities of major funders-the New York State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. It has matured without the bevy of individual collectors who support more established forms such as painting and sculpture. Within video's media arts centers and funding organizations, there are many advocates, administrators, and curators who provide an infrastructure which enables artists to produce and distribute work, often doing so with little publicity or recognition. In this realm, Howard Wise stands out as an individual benefactor who preceded and has supplemented private foundations and public monies. He has been a central figure in the visibility, production, and acceptance of video art. For almost 20 years, he has been one of the few patrons of video art.”

Marita Sturken (1957) American academic

Marita Sturken. " TV as a Creative Medium: Howard Wise and Video Art http://www.vasulka.org/archive/4-30c/AfterImageMay84(1004).pdf," in: Afterimage, May 1984

Support, Painting

“.. that distinguished aesthete [ Gustave Moreau, ] famous artist and art teacher in Paris, then] who paints nothing than rubbish, it is because his dreams are suggested not by the inspiration of Nature, but by what he has seen in the museums... I should like to have that good man under my wing, to point out to him the doctrine of a development of art by contact with Nature. It's so sane, so comforting, the only just conception of art.”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote in a conversation with Vollard, in the studio of Cézanne, in Aix, 1896; as quoted in Cezanne, by Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 66
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1880s - 1890s

Dreams, Nature, Teachers, Painting

“The science, which teaches arts and handicrafts
Is merely science for the gaining of a living;
But the science which teaches deliverance from worldly existence,
Is not that the true science?”

Nagarjuna (150–250) Indian philosopher

Prajñadanda (The Staff of Wisdom) attributed to Nagarjuna

Science

“The true test of all the arts, is not solely whether the production is a true copy of nature, but whether it answers the end of art, which is to produce a pleasing effect upon the mind.”

Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) English painter, specialising in portraits

Discourse no. 13; vol. 2, p. 136.
Discourses on Art

Nature

“That is, art is not the cancelling of the actual and imperfect, and the putting in its place of a vague and fanciful perfection that is only an illusory abstraction after all; it is the transfiguring of the actual by the ideal that is actually immanent in it. The actual hides in itself an ideal that is its true reality and destination, and this hidden ideal it is the function of art to reveal.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.183

Reality, Perfection

“Art is like sex: when you're doing it, nothing else matters. Away from his desk the novelist can care deeply about the social, political, moral aspects of what he is writing but when he sits down to write, all those concerns fall away and nothing matters except the putting down of one carefully chosen word after another carefully chosen word, until a sentence is finished, then a paragraph, then a page, then a chapter, then a book. When I'm working I don't care about anything, not even myself. All my concentration is directed towards the making of the thing on the page. The rest is just stuff — even though it is the stuff of life.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville, The Art of Fiction No. 200 (2009)

Life, Books, Sex

“I want a poetry that can learn as much from popular culture as from serious culture. A poetry that seeks the pleasure and emotionality of the popular arts without losing the precision, concentration, and depth that characterize high art. I want a literature that addresses a diverse audience distinguished for its intelligence, curiosity, and imagination rather than its professional credentials. I want a poetry that risks speaking to the fullness of our humanity, to our emotions as well as to our intellect, to our senses as well as our imagination and intuition. Finally I hope for a more sensual and physical art — closer to music, film, and painting than to philosophy or literary theory. Contemporary American literary culture has privileged the mind over the body. The soul has become embarrassed by the senses. Responding to poetry has become an exercise mainly in interpretation and analysis. Although poetry contains some of the most complex and sophisticated perceptions ever written down, it remains an essentially physical art tied to our senses of sound and sight. Yet, contemporary literary criticism consistently ignores the sheer sensuality of poetry and devotes its considerable energy to abstracting it into pure intellectualization. Intelligence is an irreplaceable element of poetry, but it needs to be vividly embodied in the physicality of language. We must — as artists, critics, and teachers — reclaim the essential sensuality of poetry. The art does not belong to apes or angels, but to us. We deserve art that speaks to us as complete human beings. Why settle for anything less?”

Dana Gioia (1950) American writer

"Paradigms Lost," interview with Gloria Brame, ELF: Eclectic Literary Forum (Spring 1995)
Interviews

Pleasure, Hope, Music, Angels

“Art is not simply an identity of illusion and reality, but a counter-illusion: its world is a material world, but the material of an intelligible spiritual world.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

1:73
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

World, Intelligence, Reality

“There are no holidays for art; and that’s just fine with the artist.”

Elfriede Jelinek book The Piano Teacher

P 29
The Piano Teacher (1988)

Holiday

“Removal of the housing shortage through comprehensive new housing buildings throughout the Reich by means of the new non-profit Construction and Economic Bank to be created according to Art. 21.”

Gottfried Feder (1883–1941) German economist and politician

Source: The German State on a National and Socialist Foundation (1923), p. 55

Housing

“The greatest foe to art is luxury, art cannot live in its atmosphere.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

The Beauty of Life (1880).

“The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Diary of an Unknown (1988)

“Do you know what was great? Finding out that a stupid, ridiculous thing like copying a postcard could lead to a picture. And then the freedom to paint whatever you felt like. Stags, aircraft, kings, secretaries. Not having to invent anything anymore, forgetting everything you meant by painting – color, composition, space – and all of the things you previously knew and thought. Suddenly none of this was a prior necessity for art.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), pp. 60-61, note 94

Stupidity, Color, Freedom, Painting

“Almost any interesting work of art comes close to saying the opposite of what it really says.”

Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) American science fiction and fantasy writer

"What I Know About Writing (in no particular order)", as quoted in Michael Swanwick, "The Wolf in the Labyrinth", Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 2007
Nonfiction

“It is necessary to separate aesthetics from art because aesthetics deals with opinions on perception of the world in general. In the past one of the two prongs of art’s function was its value as decoration. So any branch of philosophy that dealt with “beauty” and thus, taste, was inevitably duty bound to discuss art as well. Out of this “habit” grew the notion that there was a conceptual connection between art and aesthetics, which is not true. This idea never drastically conflicted with artistic considerations before recent times, not only because the morphological characteristics of art perpetuated the continuity of this error, but as well, because the apparent other “functions” of art (depiction of religious themes, portraiture of aristocrats, detailing of architecture, etc.) used art to cover up art.”

Joseph Kosuth (1945) American conceptual artist

Art after Philosophy, 1969

World, Beauty, Error, Idea

“Art was what I originally started out to do and music came second at first. I had a year at art college but I left because it was too much like school. I give all my paintings away to people I like.”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

Interview for Melody Maker with Chris Charlesworth (July 1970)

People, School, Music, Painting

“There is room in the world, no doubt, and even in old countries, for a great increase of population, supposing the arts of life to go on improving, and capital to increase. But even if innocuous, I confess I see very little reason for desiring it. The density of population necessary to enable mankind to obtain, in the greatest degree, all the advantages both of co-operation and of social intercourse, has, in all the most populous countries, been attained. If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it..”

John Stuart Mill book Principles of Political Economy

Principles of Political Economy (1848), Book IV, Chapter VI, §3, p. 516

Life, World, Hope, Support

“Outside the big idea that there is art I don't think of other's paintings. But I defend the idea of art and know that it is made up of all these paintings. Classic pictures are objects that may or may not influence what you're doing, just like anything else. Like the radio... But it hasn't anything to do with your own art or the artist's intention.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1950's, Is today's artist with or against the past, (1958)

Idea, Thinking, Painting

“The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.”

David Hilbert (1862–1943) German prominent mathematician

Quoted in Constance Reid, "Hilbert" (1970)

Mathematics

“The failure of abstract painting is due to the confusion that exists in the understanding of primitive art [as well as that] concerning the nature of abstraction.”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 1. 1943-1945, p. 139

Failure, Understanding, Nature, Painting

“Now rime, the son of rage, which art no kin to skill,
And endless grief, which deads my life, yet knows not how to kill,
Go seek that hapless tomb, which if ye hap to find,
Salute the stones that keep the bones that held so good a mind.”

Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke (1554–1628) English politician

"Elegy on Sir Philip Sidney" (1593).

Life, Rage, Dead

“Lord, oh Lord, will I return to you once, being a genuine artist. Will all those Art lovers once behold my works with reverence and the laurel of Art then adorn my head... I experience so ardently all the beauty of my noble career... And once again I call to you, it would be much better not to live at all than being disappointed in my feeling.”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

translation from original Dutch text: Fons Heijnsbroek
version in original Dutch (citaat uit de brief van Jozef Israëls, in het Nederlands): God God zal ik nog eenmaal als een waarachtig kunstenaar tot u keeren. Zullen nog eenmaal al die Kunstminnaren mijne werken met eerbied aanschouwen en de lauwer der Kunst mijn schedel sieren.. .Ik voel zo vurig al het schoone mijner edele loopbaan.. .Ach nogmaals roep ik tot u, laat mij veel liever niet leven dan in mijne gevoelen teleurgesteld te worden.
In a letter of Jozef Israels from Amsterdam, 16 July 1843, to his friend in Groningen, pharmacist Essingh; from RKD: Archive, A.S. Kok, The Hague
Quotes of Jozef Israels, 1840 - 1870

Beauty, Disappointment, Feeling, Lovers

“In the last few years there has been a harvest of books and lectures about the "Mysterious Universe." The inconceivable magnitudes with which astronomy deals produce a sense of awe which lends itself to a poetic and philosophical treatment. "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy hands, the moon and the starts, whuch thou hast ordained: what is man that thou art mindful of him? The literary skill with which this branch of science has been exploited compels one's admiration, but alos, a little, one's sense of the ridiculous. For other facts than those of astronomy, oother disciplines than of mathematics, can produce the same lively feelings of awe and reverence: the extraordinary finenness of their adjustments to the world outside: the amazing faculties of the human mind, of which we know neither whence it comes not whither it goes. In some fortunate people this reverence is produced by the natural bauty of a landscape, by the majesty of an ancient building, by the heroism of a rescue party, by poetry, or by music. God is doubtless a Mathematician, but he is also a Physiologist, an Engineer, a Mother, an Architect, a Coal Miner, a Poet, and a Gardener. Each of us views things in his own peculiar war, each clothes the Creator in a manner which fits into his own scheme. My God, for instance, among his other professions, is an Inventor: I picture him inventing water, carbon dioxide, and haemoglobin, crabs, frogs, and cuttle fish, whales and filterpassing organisms ( in the ratio of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 in size), and rejoicing greatly over these weird and ingenious things, just as I rejoice greatly over some simple bit of apparatus. But I would nor urge that God is only an Inventor: for inventors are apt, as those who know them realize, to be very dull dogs. Indeed, I should be inclined rather to imagine God to be like a University, with all its teachers and professors together: not omittin the students, for he obviously possesses, judging from his inventions, that noblest human characteristic, a sense of humour.”

Archibald Hill (1886–1977) English physiologist and biophysicist

The Ethical Dilemma of Science and Other Writings https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=zaE1AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (1960, Cap 1. Scepticism and Faith, p. 41)

God, War, People, Books

“Many fields use patterns in various ways: In music and literature, a pattern is the coherent structure or design of a song or book. In art, a pattern is the composition or plan of a work of graphic or plastic art. In architecture, a pattern is an architectural design or style. In psychology, a pattern is a thinking mechanism that is basic to the brain's operation, helping one to perceive things quickly. In archeology, a pattern is a group of phases having several distinguishing and fundamental features in common. In linguistics, a pattern is the manner in which smaller units of language are grouped into larger units…”

Peter Coad (1953) American software entrepreneur

Source: Object-oriented patterns. (1992), p. 152

Books, Music, Way, Literature

“The science of agriculture does not lay down any positive rules, but it develops the motives by which the best possible method of proceeding may be discovered and successfully pursued. In fact, the art executes some law given and received, but it is from science that law emanates.”

Albrecht Thaer (1752–1828) German agronomist and an avid supporter of the humus theory for plant nutrition

Source: The Principles of Agriculture, 1844, Section I: The fundamental principles, p. 2.

Law, Motivation, Science

“Acting has been a journey of self-discovery for me. It is the most fulfilling thing I know. It is also terrifying, and painfully awkward. But for me there is no better feeling that truthfully living in a moment, under completely imaginative circumstances. There is also nothing more devastating than walking out of an audition knowing that you were “acting” and not simply being. I feel like a fraud most of the time, but then you have these magical moments when you really feel and it is those moments that make it all worthwhile. It’s a high like nothing I have ever experienced. Acting is the most paradoxical of crafts – you have to learn it, practice obsessively and then throw it all away. Its like walking on a tightrope, there is a very thin line between passion and technique and you have to find the perfect balance. I think it’s a very personal and private art.”

Sara Malakul Lane (1983) Thai-American actress and model

Sara Malakul Lane – Getting to Know http://somethingyousaid.com/2013/08/07/getting-to-know-sara-malakul-lane-2/ (August 7, 2013)

Feeling, Imagination, Fraud, Thinking

“The great moral teachers of humanity were, in a way, artistic geniuses in the art of living.”

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

1940s, Religion and Science: Irreconcilable? (1948)

Way, Teachers

“Our task as image-bearing, God-loving, Christ-shaped, Spirit-filled Christians, following Christ and shaping our world, is to announce redemption to a world that has discovered its fallenness, to announce healing to a world that has discovered its brokenness, to proclaim love and trust to a world that knows only exploitation, fear and suspicion…The gospel of Jesus points us and indeed urges us to be at the leading edge of the whole culture, articulating in story and music and art and philosophy and education and poetry and politics and theology and even--heaven help us--Biblical studies, a worldview that will mount the historically-rooted Christian challenge to both modernity and postmodernity, leading the way…with joy and humor and gentleness and good judgment and true wisdom. I believe if we face the question, "if not now, then when?" if we are grasped by this vision we may also hear the question, "if not us, then who?"”

N.T. Wright (1948) Anglican bishop

And if the gospel of Jesus is not the key to this task, then what is?
The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is (2000)

Love, Wisdom, God, World

“Art today can only be revolutionary, that is, it must aspire at the complete and radical reconstruction of society, even if for no other reason than to emancipate intellectual creation from the chains which obstruct it and to allow all mankind to rise to the heights that only geniuses could reach in the past.”

André Breton (1896–1966) French writer

Quote of Breton, from La Clé des Champs (1953); as cited by Thomas Molnar, The Decline of the Intellectual (1961)
after 1930

Past

“An honest curator will admit that judgement is fallible, especially for art made yesterday.”

Nicholas Serota (1946) British curator

The Dimbleby Lecture 2000

“I don't know why I'm here. Everything before our eyes is ridiculous. The light is wrong, the shadows are wrong. When I enter in the studio I feel like I am entering a tomb [in the studio of their common art-teacher Thoman Couture ]. I know we can't make a model undress in the street. But there are fields, and at least in the summer we could do studies of the nude in the country, since the nude appears to be the first and the last word in art.”

Edouard Manet (1832–1883) French painter

Manet's early quote in 1850, spoken to his friend Antonin Proust; as quoted in Manet, Nathalia Brodskaya, Parkstone International, 2011, ISBN 978-1-78042-029-5, p. 12
1850 - 1875

Feeling, Study, Light, Teachers

“The Orestia shows that society is a defense against nature. Everything intelligible -- institutions, objects, persons, ideas -- is the result of Apollonian clarification, adjudication, and action. Western politics, science, psychology and art are creations of arrogant Apollo. Through every century, winning or losing, western mind has struggled to keep nature at bay. The Orestia’s sexist transition from matriarchy to patriarchy records the rebellion every imagination must make against nature. Without that rebellion, we as a species are condemned to regression or stasis. Even rebelling, we cannot get far. But vying with fate is godlike.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 101

Fate, Imagination, Intelligence, Idea

“And at that point, too, in Buddhist India as in Babylon, in Rome as in our own cities, a man's choice of the woman who is to be, not mother of his children as amongst peasants and primitives, but his own "companion for life", becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the "higher spiritual affinity" in which both parties are "free"—free, that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say "that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself." The primary woman, the peasant woman, is mother. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of "mutual understanding"….
At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the Fellah type.
If anything has demonstrated the fact that Causality has nothing to do with history, it is the familiar "decline" of the Classical, which accomplished itself long before the irruption of Germanic migrants. The Imperium enjoyed the completest peace; it was rich and highly developed; it was well organized; and it possessed in its emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius a series of rulers such as the Caesarism of no other Civilization can show. And yet the population dwindled, quickly and wholesale. The desperate marriage-and-children laws of Augustus—amongst them the Lex de maritandis ordinibus, which dismayed Roman society more than the destruction of Varus's legions—the wholesale adoptions, the incessant plantation of soldiers of barbarian origin to fill the depleted country-side, the immense food-charities of Nerva and Trajan for the children of poor parents—nothing availed to check the process.”

Oswald Spengler book The Decline of the West

Vol. II, Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, pp. 104–06 https://archive.org/stream/Decline-Of-The-West-Oswald-Spengler/Decline_Of_The_West#page/n573/mode/2up/search/depopulation The Decline of the West (1918, 1923)

Life, Marriage, Children, World

“A sculpture, a map, a photograph; all the forms of my work are equal and complementary. The knowledge of my actions, in whatever form, is the art. My art is the essence of my experience, not a representation of it.”

Richard Long (1945) artist

Richard Long: Books, Prints, Printed Matter. Exhib cat New York Public Library, New York 1994
1990s

Knowledge

“The more rigorously criticism historicizes a work of art, in the sense of lodging it in the context of the moment of its production, the less likely it becomes for criticism to be able to explain either its own subsequent interest in the work or the possibility of lay—that is, nonacademic—interest in reading it.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), pp. 5-6.

Sense, Reading

“I don't want to produce a work of art that the public can sit and suck aesthetically…. I want to give them a blow in the small of the back, to scorch their indifference, to startle them out of their complacency.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

As quoted in "Film master Ingmar Bergman dies at 89" by Myrna Oliver in Los Angeles Times (31 July 2007) http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-me-bergman31jul31,0,3877362,full.story?coll=la-home-world.

Indifference

“A modern poet has characterized the personality of art and the impersonality of science as follows: Art is I: Science is We.”

Claude Bernard (1813–1878) French physiologist

Bulletin of New York Academy of Medicine, Vol. IV (1928)

Science, Personality

“Were we required to characterise this age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call it, not an Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age. It is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might, forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means to ends. Nothing is now done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from his workshop, to make room for a speedier, inanimate one. The shuttle drops from the fingers of the weaver, and falls into iron fingers that ply it faster.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1820s, Signs of the Times (1829)

Age, Sense, Help

“I cannot teach my art, nor the art of any school whatever, since I deny that art can be taught, or, in other words, I maintain that art is completely individual, and is, for each artist, nothing but the talent issuing from his own inspiration and his own studies of tradition.”

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) French painter

1860s, Realist Manifesto' - an open letter, 1861

School, Study

“The history of art… resembles a broken but much-repaired chain made of string and wire to connect the occasional jeweled links surviving as physical evidences of the invisible original sequence of prime objects.”

George Kubler (1912–1996) American art historian

Source: The Shape of Time, 1982, p. 40; as cited in Lee (2001, p. 55)

History

“Oh, early Kandinsky.. [stuck her early]. Well no, they had that at the Art Institute in Chicago, don't forget. See, everybody, to do 'modern art' then [New York, mid-forties], seemed to me, when you were going 'modern' [both chuckle], it was Picasso. I mean, everybody. But I avoided that like the plague. I thought... I loved Picasso, but it just wasn't for me... Well, I don't! I have some of those [early] paintings from LeLavandou - they're in storage - and from Mexico. They were Expressionist landscapes, or boats on the beach or something like that, which I still do. Sort of going abstract, going towards..”

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) American painter

first side of the first tape
1975 - 1992, Oral history interview with Joan Mitchell, 1986

Love, Painting, Forgetting

“How can this cosmic religious experience be communicated from man to man, if it cannot lead to a definite conception of God or to a theology? It seems to me that the most important function of art and of science is to arouse and keep alive this feeling in those who are receptive.”

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

Wording in Ideas and Opinions: How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
1930s, Religion and Science (1930)

God, Feeling, Communication, Science

“For me the art world is like a huge river, which began somewhere in the past and keeps flowing towards the future.”

Ilya Kabakov (1933) Soviet and American conceptual artist

Source: Boris Groĭs, ‎David A. Ross, ‎Iwona Blazwick (1998). Ilya Kabakov, p. 22

World, Past, Future

“The fine art world and the commercial art industry are both all about money. It's hard to say which is more contemptible: the fine art world with its double talk and pretensions to the cultural high ground, or the world of commercial art trying to sell to the largest mass market it can reach. A serious artist really shouldn't be too deeply involved in either of these worlds. It's best to be on the fringe of them. In general, if you want to be a success and make the money, you have to play the game. It's no different in the fine art world, it's just a slightly different game. Essentially, you're marketing an illusion. It's much easier to lie to humans and trick them than to tell them the truth. They'd much rather be bamboozled than be told the truth, because the way to trick them is to flatter them and tell them what they want to hear, to reinforce their existing illusions. They don't want to know the truth. Truth is a bring-down, a bummer, or it's just too complicated, too much mental work to grasp.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 297

Money, Truth, Lie, World

“Good bye, proud world! I'm going home;
Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Good Bye
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Variant: Good bye, proud world! I'm going home;
Thou art not my friend; I am not thine.

World, Home

“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

Life, Truth, Justice, Law

“System engineering is the art and science of creating effective systems, using whole system, whole life principles.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Derek Hitchins (1995) cited in: Herbert Negele (2000) Systems engineering--a key to competitive advantage for all industries. p,166

Life, Science

“Look out! Be on your guard, because alone of all the arts, music moves all around you.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Le Coq et l’Arlequin (1918)

Music

“The aesthetic is the sine qua none for art: if a work is not aesthetic, it is not art by definition... We feel through the senses, and everyone knows that the content of art is feeling; it is the creation of an object for sensing that is the artist's task; and it is the qualities of this object that constitute its felt content.”

Robert Motherwell (1915–1991) American artist

Source: 1940s, Beyond the Aesthetics' (1946), pp. 36-37

Feeling, Sense

“The Oresteia, King Lear, Dostoevsky's The Devils no less than the art of Giotto or the Passions of Bach, inquire into, dramatize, the relations of man and woman to the existence of the gods or of God.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: Real Presences (1989), III: Presences, Ch. 6 (p. 225).

God, Passion

“Oh! world of sweet phantoms, how precious thou art!
The past is perpetual youth to the heart.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Youth, World, Past, Heart

“The story of English literature, viewed aesthetically, is one thing; the story of English writers is quite another. The price of contributing to the greatest literature the world has ever seen is often struggle and penury: art is still too often its own reward. It is salutary sometimes to think of the early deaths of Keats, Shelley, Byron, Chatterton, Dylan Thomas, of the Grub Street struggles of Dr. Johnson, the despair of Gissing and Francis Thompson. That so many writers have been prepared to accept a kind of martyrdom is the best tribute that flesh can pay to the living spirit of man as expressed in his literature. One cannot doubt that the martyrdom will continue to be gladly embraced. To some of us, the wresting of beauty out of language is the only thing in the world that matters.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, English Literature: A Survey for Students (1958, revised 1974)

Death, World, Beauty, Literature

“Imitation of the art of earlier centuries, as that done by Picasso and Modigliani, is carried on not to perpetuate ancient values but to demonstrate that new aesthetic orders now prevail.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art on the Edge, (1975), p. 138, "Criticism and Its Premises"

“Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.”

Ralph Ellison (1914–1994) American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer

"Richard Wright's Blues" (1945), in The Collected Essays, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), p. 133.

Life, Sea

“Because the art of Africa was on rock shelters, not deep in caves, as in Europe, the ravages of time have eroded most of a rich expression. What we now see is the merest glimpse of what was on the minds of these people.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

Origins Reconsidered: In Search of What Makes Us Human (1992)

People, Time

“The notion of style has long been the art historian's principal mode of classifying works of art. By style he selects and shapes the history of art.”

George Kubler (1912–1996) American art historian

George Kubler summarizing the view of Meyer Schapiro (with whom he disagrees), quoted by Alpers in Lang, Berel (ed.), The Concept of Style, 1987, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ISBN 0801494397

History

“Damien Hirst's Mother and Child Divided (1993) is a work which can at first glance be read as nothing more than two brutally severed carcasses. "A freak show" was how the art critic of the Sunday Telegraph responded to its presentation in the Turner Prize in 1995. For me, the undoubted shock, even disgust provoked by the work is part of its appeal. Art should be transgressive. Life is not all sweet.”

Nicholas Serota (1946) British curator

The Dimbleby Lecture 2000

Life, Reading, Parting

“I can’t wait to get into a position to make really bad art and get away with it. At the moment if I did certain things people would look at it, consider it and then say "f off". But after a while you can get away with things.”

Damien Hirst (1965) artist

Spalding, Julian. "Why it's OK not to like modern art" http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article1098907.ece?token=null&offset=12&page=2, The Times, 8 May 2003. Hirst quoted by Julian Stallabrass in 1990.

People, Waiting

“You may tell a man thou art a fiend, but not your nose wants blowing; to him alone who can bear a thing of that kind, you may tell all.”

Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) Swiss poet

No. 84
Aphorisms on Man (c. 1788)

“My dear Chantrey, - I intended long before this (but you will say, Fudge) to have written: but even now very little information have I to give you in matters of Art, for I have confined myself to the painting department at Corso; and having finished one, am about the second, and getting on with Lord E.'s, which I began the very first touch at Rome; but as the folk here talked that I would show them not, I finished a small three feet four [painting] to stop their gabbling..”

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker

Quote in Turner's letter from Rome, 6 Nov. 1828, to his friend Francis Chantrey; as cited in The Life of J. M. W. Turner R.A. , Walter Thornbury - A new Edition, Revised https://ia601807.us.archive.org/24/items/gri_33125004491185/gri_33125004491185.pdf; London Chatto & Windus, 1897, p. 10 1821 - 1851

Painting

“It is true that other people can help you, and to lasting effect... If I hadn't had Beckett in 1940 [in Paris, when Van Velde was strongly demoralized by the death of his wife], I'm not sure I could have stood it. I am really not sure... At that time he [Beckett] he was driven by an extremely aggressive and fiery Irish spirit. That has lessened as time has gone on... I don't know anywhere in modern art any more faithful or more impressive picture of contemporary humanity than the one he offers us in 'The Unamable.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

2 November 1970; p. 79
1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

Death, People, Faith, Time

“My father once told me that the art of receiving a compliment is, of all things, the sign of a civilized man. He died soon afterwards, leaving my education in this important matter sadly incomplete; I'm only glad that, on this, the occasion of the rarest compliment he ever could have dreamed of, that he isn't here to see his son so publicly at a loss. In receiving a compliment, or in trying to, the words are all worn out by now. They're polluted by ham and corn. And, when you try to scratch around for some new ones, it's just an exercise in empty cleverness. What I feel this evening, is not very clever. it's the very opposite of emptiness. The corny old phrase is the only one I know to say it: my heart is full; with a full heart, with all of it, I thank you. This is Samuel Johnson, on the subject of what he calls contrarieties: "there are goods, so opposed that we cannot seize both, and, in trying, fail to seize either. Flatter not yourself, he says, with contrarieties. Of the blessings set before you, make your choice. No man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source, and from the mouth of the nile." For this business of contrarieties has to do with us. With you, who are paying me this compliment, and for me, who has strayed so far from this hometown of ours. Not that I am alone in this, or unique, I am never that; but there are a few of us left in this conglomerated world of us who still trudge stubbornly along this lonely rocky road; and this is in fact our contrariety. We don't move nearly as fast as our cousins on the freeway; we don't even get as much accomplished just as the family sized farm can't possibly raise as many crops or get as much profit as the agricultural factory of today. What we do come up with has no special right to call itself better it's just.. different. No if there's any excuse for us it all, it's that we're simply following the old American tradition of the maverick, and we are a vanishing breed. This honor I can only accept in the name of all the mavericks. And also, as a tribute to the generosity of all the rest of you; to the givers, to the ones with fixed addresses. A maverick may go his own way but he doesn't think that it's the only way, or ever claim that it's the best one, except maybe for himself. And don't imagine that this raggle-taggle gypsy-o is claiming to be free. It's just that some of the necessities to which I am a slave are different from yours. As a director, for instance, I pay myself out of my acting jobs. I use my own work to subsidize my work (in other words I'm crazy). But not crazy enough to pretend to be free. But it's a fact that many of the films you've seen tonight could never have been made otherwise. Or, if otherwise, well, they might have been better, but certainly they wouldn't have been mine. The truth is I don't believe that this great evening would ever have brightened my life if it wasn't for this: my own, particular, contrariety. Let us raise our cups, then, standing as some of us do on opposite ends of the river, to what really matters to us all: to our crazy, beloved profession, to the movies — to good movies, to every possible kind.”

Orson Welles (1915–1985) American actor, director, writer and producer

Speech given upon his acceptance of the AFI Lifetime Achievement award. Viewable http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXJnxClGamA&list=HL1349840607&feature=mh_lolz

Life, Truth, World, Education

“Reductionism can expand our vision and give us new insights into the nature and creation of art.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)

Nature

“Diogenes the cynic, seeing one of the so-called freedmen pluming himself, while many heartily congratulated him, marveled at the absence of reason and discernment. “A man might as well,” he said, “proclaim that one of his servants became a grammarian, a geometrician, or musician, when he has no idea whatever of the art.” For as the proclamation cannot make them men of knowledge, so neither can it make them free.”

Diogenes of Sinope (-404–-322 BC) ancient Greek philosopher, one of the founders of the Cynic philosophy

Philo, Every Good Man is Free, F. Colson, trans. (1941), 157
Quoted by Philo

Men, Idea, Knowledge

“Loveliest of women! heaven is in thy soul,
Beauty and virtue shine forever round thee,
Bright'ning each other! thou art all divine!”

Joseph Addison book Cato

Act III, scene ii.
Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

Women, Beauty, Soul

“A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Une oeuvre où il y a des théories est comme un objet sur lequel on laisse la marque du prix. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, part VII: Time Regained, chapter III, "An Afternoon Party at the House of the Princesse de Guermantes" ( French version http://web.archive.org/web/20010708070436/http://gallica.bnf.fr/proust/TempsRetrouve.htm and English translation http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/p/proust/marcel/p96t/chapter3.html). Misattributed

“Dubbed as a Knight of the Order of Saint Sebastian, I espoused the cause of pure colour, which has been invaded by guile, occupied and oppressed in cowardly fashion by line and its manifestation; drawing in Art. I aimed to defend and deliver it, and lead it to triumph and final glory.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

In 1956; p. 27
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

Fashion, Drawing

“It is the things of the spirit, the arts of the country, which have always led mankind forward, and it is to this spirit that the craftsmen of the world must lend themselves.”

Aileen Osborn Webb (1892–1979) American patron of the arts

Zaiden, Emily. "Craft In America / The American Craft Council and Aileen Osborn Webb." Craft In America / The American Craft Council and Aileen Osborn Webb. N.p., n.d. Web. 19 Oct. 2013. <http://www.craftinamerica.org/artists_metal/story_585.php>.

World, Country

“As a work of art it has the same status as a long conversation between two not very bright drunks…”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'A Blizzard of Tiny Kisses'
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

“Passivity, like the passivity of India induced by religion, is destructive both to human life and to art.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Life, Religion

“But if politics is an art, it is not like sculpture or painting, where one side acts and the other is passive material. It is more like drama without a script, or dance without choreography - in other words, improvisation. Either player may surprise us again with a new move.”

Thomas Flanagan (political scientist) (1944) author, academic, and political activist

Source: Game Theory and Canadian Politics (1998), Chapter 3, Stalemate At Lubicon Lake, p. 54.

Dance, Painting

“A work of art must narrate something that does not appear within its outline. The objects and figures represented in it must likewise poetically tell you of something that is far away from them and also of what their shapes materially hide from us. A certain dog painted by Courbet (French 19th century painter) is like the story of a poetic and romantic hunt.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

1919
as quoted in Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and Marco Treves; Pantheon Books, 1972, London, p. 440
1908 - 1920, On Mystery and Creation, Paris 1913

Dogs, Appearance, Painting

“Josef Albers's [a former art teacher of Rauschenberg, on Black Mountain College ] rule is to make order. As for me, I consider myself successful when I do something that resembles the lack of order I sense. (around 1949 during Black Mountain College, fh).”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

In Robert Rauschenberg, Works, Writings and Interviews, Sam Hunter; as quoted in Ediciones Poligrafa, Barcelona, Spain, 2006, p. 37
1950's

Mountain, Sense, Teachers, Success

“The art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about maps,
But Biography is about chaps.”

Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875–1956) British writer

Clerihews: Biography for Beginners (1905)

“Out of the savage tribe grew up the barbarian village community; and a new, still wider, circle of social customs, habits, and institutions, numbers of which are still alive among ourselves, was developed under the principles of common possession of a given territory and common defence of it, under the jurisdiction of the village folkmote, and in the federation of villages belonging, or supposed to belong, to one stem. And when new requirements induced men to make a new start, they made it in the city, which represented a double network of territorial units (village communities) connected with guilds, these latter arising out of the common prosecution of a given art or craft, or for mutual support and defence.”

Peter Kropotkin book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902)

Men, Communication, Support

“There were nude pictures… a lot of it is erotic or sexual. But I don't view my collection as dirty in any way. I view it as art.”

Paul Reubens (1952) American actor, writer, film producer, game show host, and comedian

2004 interview with Entertainment Weekly http://www.abc.net.au/news/2004-04-01/pee-wee-actor-denies-paedophile-claims/162146 2004 Child Porn Charges

Way

“Thinking is seeing," said he one day, carried away by some objection raised as to the first principles of our organisation."Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the effect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Penser, c'est voir! me dit-il un jour emporté par une de nos objections sur le principe de notre organisation. Toute science humaine repose sur la déduction, qui est une vision lente par laquelle on descend de la cause à l'effet, par laquelle on remonte de l'effet à la cause; ou, dans une plus large expression, toute poésie comme toute oeuvre d'art procède d'une rapide vision des choses. Honoré de Balzac, Louis Lambert http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Louis_Lambert (1832), translated by Clara Bell

Thinking, Sense, Science

“My work is a complex product of a personality continuous with all of nature, and one making progressively better-integrated efforts to structure experience on all levels…. My art is the result of a deeply personal, infinitely complex, and still essentially mysterious, exploration of experience. No words will ever touch it.”

George Brecht (1926–2008) American artist and composer

George Brecht, 1957/58, cited in: George Brecht, ‎Alfred M. Fischer (2005). George Brecht: events : eine Heterospektive. p. 224

Nature, Effort, Personality

“Back in Moscow in 1925 - teacher at 'Vchutemas' of interior design and furniture at the faculty of wood and metalwork. In 1926 my most important artistic work began: designing exhibitions. In that year I was invited by the committee of the International Exhibition of Art in Dresden to design the space for contemporary art. Was sent abroad for by 'VOKS.”

El Lissitsky (1890–1941) Soviet artist, designer, photographer, teacher, typographer and architect

[In] 1927 Exhibition of Typography in Moscow.
1926 - 1941, Autobiography of the artist' (1941)

Teachers

“The climax of absurdity to which the art may be carried, when led away from nature by fashion, may be best seen in the works of Boucher… His landscape, of which he was evidently fond, is pastoral; and such pastorality! the pastoral of the Opera house.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Notes of Six Lectures on Landscape Painting (1836), C.R. Leslie, Memoirs of the Life of John Constable (1843), p. 343
1830s, his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)

Fashion, Nature, Housing

“I intend to make this day forward the first day of the rest of my life. We can change our lives. You say, 'Well, what's wrong with your life, Michael?' Well, it's not that there's anything wrong with my life, but it's not what I want it to be. I don't feel that I'm inspiring people in the way I want to inspire them. You see, you can inspire through hate; you can inspire through love, hope, humor – the positives. I look at the history of the world, and I look at the world today, and I realize that if we don't inspire each other through positive attributes – love, hope and humor – we're gonna descend into the barbarism of the Left and the barbarism of ISIS. You like me to be hard, you like me to be tough, you like me to give you the breaking news, you like me to be cynical, you like me to analytical, you like me to give you stuff that you don't hear anywhere else – I get that. But there's a limit to that. There's a lot of area beyond all that.I think of Christmas. Christianity is the religion of peace. Christianity is the true religion of peace. 'Turn the other cheek.' 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' These are messages that come from Christianity. What can you do in an age of deceit and lies and terror? You can go to church again. However un-needing you think you really are, you know in your heart that there's something missing in you. You know that you crave something greater. Because the human being is not a dog. We are unique creatures. And we need something different than the bear, the dog, the snake and the eagle. What is that thing that we need? It's that 'thing' called God.The media has promulgated the idea, and promoted the idea, that we only need food and fornication. And so when people are empty that's what they seek. And when they are really empty, what happens? They become drug addicts. They start with marijuana, they end up with heroin, crack, you name it. As God has been driven out of America, drugs have entered America. What does an empty soul look to do? An empty soul looks to fill itself. Just as an empty vessel needs to be filled with a liquid to be complete, an empty human being needs to fill itself to be complete. And how does it fill itself? I know, again, many of you will laugh because you're cynical; it's through those things I'm talking about – inspiration. Do you think a musician can play one day without inspiration from somewhere? The greatest artists in the history of the world were not drug-addicts. They were usually God-addicts. Look at the greatest art in history, you'll find most of them were super religious people, who literally saw God in their living room, and they took the power of God and that was transmitted through the paintbrush, or through that piece of marble. How could a man like Rodin take a piece of inert stone, and inside that stone see the essence of the human form, and sculpt from that block of inert stone, a marble, the portrait of a human being that looks so real – a hundred years later I go and look at them in the museum, and literally inside that carved eye I can see the person; how is that possible? How? It's a different show than I've ever done in my 21 years, because each day to me – I must tell you – I see as my last day, my last day on Earth.”

Michael Savage (1942) U.S. radio talk show host, Commentator, and Author

The Savage Nation (1995- ), 2015

Love, Life, God, Hate

“Everything is art. Everything is politics.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Coonan, Clifford. “ An Artist’s Struggle for Justice in China http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/an-artists-struggle-for-justice-in-china1912352.html.” Independent, February 27, 2010. 2010-, 2010

“I came to art because I wanted to escape the other regulations of the society. The whole society is so political. But the irony is that my art becomes more and more political.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Wines, Michael. “China’s Impolitic Artist, Still Waiting to Be Silenced.” New York Times, November 28, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/28/world/asia/28weiwei.html?pagewanted=all
2000-09, 2009

“It should be underlined that while the democratic or state socialist believes that socialist governments will be peaceloving and nonviolent, the Marxist-Leninist believes this true of only the final, communist stage of stateless anarchy. The socialist transition period may well involve war with capitalist states, but while this inter-state war is to be avoided if at all possible in this age of nuclear weapons, the world-wide struggle against capitalism must be pursued by all means short of inter-state war. This would involve not only the arts of deception, disinformation, subversion, and demoralization, against capitalist states, but also terrorism and domestic wars through ‘national liberation fronts’. For the Marxist-Leninist, then, it is the communist system that is inherently peaceful, not the socialist intermediary state. This socialist stage means the purposeful, aggressive use of force and violence to pursue the final, global stage of communist peace and freedom.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

“Political Systems, Violence, and War,” chap. 14 in "Approaches to Peace: An Intellectual Map", edit, W. Scott Thompson and Kenneth M. Jensen, Washington, D.C., United States Institute of Peace, 1991, pp. 347-370; and “The Politics of Cold Blood,” Society, Vol. 27 (November/December, 1989) pp. 32-40

War, Age, World, Peace

Quotes about art page 28

Quotes about art
page 28