Quotes about art
page 56

“If we cannot make voluntary and conscious steps in the admirable science of universals, let us see the parts wisely, and infer the genius of nature from the best particulars with a becoming charity. What is best in each kind is an index of what should be the average of that thing. Love shows me the opulence of nature, by disclosing to me in my friend a hidden wealth, and I infer an equal depth of good in every other direction. It is commonly said by farmers that a good pear or apple costs no more time or pains to rear than a poor one; so I would have no work of art, no speech, or action, or thought, or friend, but the best.”

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

1840s, Essays: Second Series (1844), Nominalist and Realist

Love, Pain, Making love, Nature

“Insanity is a very high art form. If everyone was insane, I wouldn’t be here!”

Rik Mayall (1958–2014) British comedian and actor

The Stage, January 2007 https://www.thestage.co.uk/opinion/2014/remembering-rik-mayall-one-oddest-fun-interviews-ive-ever-done/

“There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1960s, The Quest for Peace and Justice (1964)

Bird, Fish, Learning, Flying

“And all over the country the antagonists of human liberty, of human dignity—the racketeers, the crooked political figures, the shysters, the dealers in phony religions, the sweat-shoppers, the petty authoritarians, all of the key figures among the traffickers in human misery and human oppression, themselves somewhat adept in the arts of the mind and acutely aware of the danger of free knowledge—all of this unholy breed stirred uneasily and wondered what was taking place.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Lost Legacy

Lost Legacy (p. 339)
Short fiction, Off the Main Sequence (2005)

Religion, Knowledge, Country

“I am told that there are still left over 18,000 Hindus and Sikhs in Rawalpindi and 30,000 in the Wah Camp. I will repeat my advice that they should all be prepared to die rather than leave their homes. The art of dying bravely and with honour does not need any special training, save a living faith in God. Then there will be no abductions and no forcible conversions. I know that you are anxious I should go to the Punjab at the earliest moment. I want to do so. But if I failed in Delhi, it is impossible for me to succeed in Pakistan. For I want to go to all the parts and provinces of Pakistan under the protection of no escort save God. I will go as a friend of the Muslims as of others. My life will be at their disposal. I hope that I may cheerfully die at the hands of anyone who chooses to take my life. Then I will have done as I have advised all to do.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

SELECTED WRITINGS OF MAHATMA GANDHI https://web.archive.org/web/20180216130212/https://www.mkgandhi.org/swmgandhi/chap07.htm, Extracts from the Delhi Diary, 23 September 1947. 1940s

Life, God, Faith, Hope

“No difference of rank, position, or birth, is so great as the gulf that separates the countless millions who use their head only in the service of their belly, in other words, look upon it as an instrument of the will, and those very few and rare persons who have the courage to say: No! my head is too good for that; it shall be active only in its own service; it shall try to comprehend the wondrous and varied spectacle of this world and then reproduce it in some form, whether as art or as literature, that may answer to my character as an individual.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

On Genius, Parerga and Paralipomena, Chapter III,
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851)

World, Literature, Birth, Courage

“The new artist-society will consist of painters, sculptors and architects. The founders don’t intend that the character of the union will be determined by one single art movement. They believe that there is room for every important expression of this period and they intend the new union as a gathering place for the best young artists, who will collectively determine the character of the society.”

Charley Toorop (1891–1955) Dutch painter

translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek
(original Dutch: tekst in circulaire van Charley Toorop, in het Nederlands:) De nieuwe vereeniging zal bestaan uit schilders, beeldhouwers en architecten. De oprichters stellen zich niet op het standpunt, dat het karakter der vereeniging door één enkele kunstrichting bepaald wordt. Zy gelooven dat voor iedere belangrijke uiting van deze tyd plaats is en bedoelen de nieuwe vereeniging als verzamelplaats voor de beste jonge kunstenaars, die gezamenlyk het karakter van de vereeniging bepalen.
text of Charley Toorop, in a circular for possible members of the new artist-society 'A.S.B.', Amsterdam 8 Dec. 1926; in the Archive J.J.P. Oud, Nederlands Architectuur museum, Rotterdam
before 1930

“The historical records of every nation are full of the doings of men of genius in all the different departments of human activity, men who in their special lines of work and ability have stood far above the rest— indeed, so far that at times (and probably more often than we know) their ideals were utterly beyond the comprehension of the people, so that not only the work that they may have done has been lost to mankind, but their very names even have not been preserved. It has been said that the history of every nation could be written in the biography of a few individuals, and that it is always the few, towering above the rest, who initiate the great forward steps in art, music, literature, science, philosophy, philanthropy, statecraft, and religion. They stand high sometimes in love of God and their fellow-men, as great saints and philanthropists; sometimes in understanding of man and Nature, as great philosophers, sages and scientists; sometimes in work for humanity, as great liberators and reformers.”

Charles Webster Leadbeater (1854–1934) English theosophist

Source: The Masters and the Path (1925), Ch. 1

Love, Men, God, People

“We are about to enter an era in which the innate spiritual nature of humanity will begin to express itself in a mass form. Countless millions throughout the world will awaken to the true purpose of their lives. A deeper, more soundly-based attitude to life will develop and people will…come to understand the purpose of their incarnation, and, more and more, they will take a conscious part in their own evolution, creating modes of freedom and justice which this world has never before seen. Freedom and justice, and therefore peace, will allow the divine, spiritual aspect of humanity to come to the fore and be given expression, not only as a religious experience, but in every department of life. In politics, economics and education, in art and science, the inner awareness of our spiritual nature will increasingly be demonstrated.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

Maitreya's Mission Vol. III (1997)

Life, People, World, Education

“Here information and philosophies were exchanged, together with all manner of goods. This was a court whose energies were not devoted to maintaining itself unchanged for eternity, but to every kind of new idea and lively, humane discussion, which welcomed fresh thought not as a threat to its existence but as a very necessity to its continued well-being, whose wealth was devoted to experiment in the arts and sciences, to supporting those who were needy, to aiding thinkers and scholars. The Bright Empire’s brightness would come no longer from the glow of putrefaction but from the light of reason and good will.”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Book 1, Chapter 3 “On the Red Road” (p. 160)
The Elric Cycle, The Fortress of the Pearl (1989)

Idea, Support, Light, Science

“Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 13, p. 62
Leviathan (1651)

Life, Death, Men, Fear

“We have become victims of our own art. We touch people on the outsides of their bodies, and they us, but we cannot get at their insides and cannot reveal our insides to them. This is one of the great tragedies of our interiority—it is utterly personal and unrevealable. Often we want to say something unusually intimate to a spouse, a parent, a friend, communicate something of how we are really feeling about a sunset, who we really feel we are—only to fall strangely and miserably flat. Once in a great while we succeed, sometimes more with one person, less or never with others. But the occasional breakthrough only proves the rule. You reach out with a disclosure, fail, and fall back bitterly into yourself.”

Ernest Becker (1924–1974) American anthropologist

Source: The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man (1962), p. 27

People, Feeling, Communication, Parent

“Since the House had been prorogued in the summer much work was done in France. The French had shewn themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground, their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures.”

Edmund Burke book Reflections on the Revolution in France

Speech in the House of Commons (9 February 1790), quoted in J. C. D. Clark, 'Introduction', in Clark (ed.), Reflections on the Revolution in France: A Critical Edition (Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 66.
1790s

World, Law, Time, Summer

“Unsere Aufgabe muß es vielmehr sein, die Lebewesen als Systeme besonderer Art von in dynamischer Wechselwirkung stehenden Elementen zu betrachten und die hier geltenden Systemgesetze zu ermitteln, welche die Ordnung aller Teile und Vorgänge untereinander beherrschen. Notwendig ist sowohl die Untersuchung der Teile und Vorgänge als auch der Beziehungen, in denen diese zueinander und zum Ganzen stehen.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Bertalanffy (1937), Das Gefüge des Lebens. Teubner, Leizig. p. 12
1930s

“This is a strong magic. This is a sententious magic. They had warned me that I would here face my own destruction, that I would here face the most pitiable and terrible of all things: and I face here that which I have made of life, and life of me. I shudder; I am conscious of every appropriate sentiment. Nevertheless, sir, I must venture the suggestion that mere, explicit allegory as a form of art is somewhat obsolete.”

James Branch Cabell (1879–1958) American author

Guivric, in Book Six : In the Sylan's House, Ch. XL : Economics of Glaum-Without-Bones
The Silver Stallion (1926)

Life, Strong

“Escape, God how we all need escape from this tiny here. The need for it has motivated just about everything man has ever done in any direction other than that of the satisfaction of his physical appetites; it has led him along weird and wonderful pathways; it has led him into art and religion, ascetism and astrology, dancing and drinking, poetry and insanity. All of these have been escapes because he has known only recently the true direction of escape—outward, into infinity and eternity, away from this little flat if rounded surface we’re born on and die on. This mote in the solar system, this atom in the galaxy.”

Fredric Brown book The Lights in the Sky Are Stars

Source: The Lights in the Sky Are Stars (1953), Chapter 5 “2001” (pp. 243-244; "ascetism" should be "asceticism")

God, Religion, Motivation, Drink

“The loss of many traditional jobs in everything from art to healthcare will partly be offset by the creation of new human jobs. GPs who focus on diagnosing known diseases and administering familiar treatments will probably be replaced by AI doctors. But precisely because of that, there will be much more money to pay human doctors and lab assistants to do groundbreaking research and develop new medicines or surgical procedures.”

Yuval Noah Harari book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Money, Disease, Loss

“I have given detailed instructions for the establishment of silk industry in Mysore. Silk worms and men well versed in the art of rearing them have already arrived from foreign lands to train our people. Eighteen centres have been set up for development of the industry. Many more are needed. Every encouragement is being given to plantation of mulberry trees. I would like you to take direct interest in this developmental activity. My goal is clear: I want Mysore to be the foremost amongst silk producing nations.”

Tipu Sultan (1750–1799) Ruler of the Sultanate of Mysore

Tipu Sultan's address on 1788, Quoted in The Sword of Tipu Sultan, by Bhagwan S Gidwani https://books.google.com.sa/books?id=EimPBAAAQBAJ&lpg=PP1&pg=PT262#v=onepage&q&f=true From Tipu Sultan's Decrees

Men, People, Tree, Training

“Gradually Western thinkers were beginning to attack the very foundations of Western thought. We were naive in our expectation that mechanistic science would explain the mysteries of life. These spokesmen for a larger worldview pointed out how our institutions were violating nature: Our education and philosophy failed to value art, feelings, intuition.”

Marilyn Ferguson (1938–2008) American writer

The Aquarian Conspiracy (1980), Chapter Two, Premonitions of Transformation and Conspiracy

Life, Education, Feeling, Nature

“I look forward to an America which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft. I look forward to an America which will steadily raise the standards of artistic accomplishment and which will steadily enlarge cultural opportunities for all of our citizens. And I look forward to an America which commands respect throughout the world not only for its strength but for its civilization as well. And I look forward to a world which will be safe not only for democracy and diversity but also for personal distinction.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, Speech at Amherst College

World, Democracy, Business, Personality

“Why then dost thou choose to act in the same way? and why dost thou not leave these agitations which are foreign to nature, to those who cause them and those who are moved by them? And why art thou not altogether intent upon the right way of making use of things which happen to thee?”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

for then thou wilt use them well, and they will be material for thee. Only attend to thyself, and resolve to be a good man in every act which thou doest; and remember...
Source: Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book VII, 58

Making love, Way, Nature

“In Taiwan, we have cultural heritage from (Mainland) China, Japan, Netherlands, Spain and Portugal, which has resulted in a deep melting pot of cultures and an acceptance of many cultures. Against that background, we can see diverse traditional arts in Taiwan.”

Hsiao Tsung-huang Taiwanese politician

Hsiao Tsung-huang (2019) cited in " A country's performing arts reflect its democracy: culture minister http://focustaiwan.tw/news/aedu/201907200010.aspx" on Focus Taiwan, 20 July 2019

“Cricket is an art, not a bastard or a poor relation, but a full member of the community. (…) Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belong with the theatre, ballet, opera and dance.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 196

Communication, Relation ships, Dance

“I could, of course, wait for the Conservative Party or the Labour Party to organise a sample poll. A poll on art. A sample poll! A sample poll can investigate only what the pollsters know, and it cannot do even that properly.”

C. L. R. James book Beyond a Boundary

Source: Beyond a Boundary (1963), p. 153-154

Waiting

“You know, in his last six months Vasyl had changed a lot. Many tried to talk him out of going to the war, but he was adamant. All his money and all his energy he gave to the cause of the new Ukraine. It was his motivation in life. What a shame that a sharpshooter’s bullet took the life of terrific vocalist and patriot. Our duty is to remember Vasyl Slipak. I want to join my Ukrainian colleagues to discuss some future art projects. We already had a meeting with Volodymyr Syvokhip, director of the Lviv Philharmonic Society, and we plan to hold a Vasyl Slipak Open International Memorial Music Marathon in Lviv from June 29 till July 1.”

Vasyl Slipak (1974–2016) Ukrainian opera singer

2017 Nicolas Krauze, conductor, the Orchestre de Chambre Nouvelle Europe (France). “He loved Ukraine above all”. The Day. Кyiv.ua. - 2017. - 7 March. https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/culture/he-loved-ukraine-above-all

Life, Money, War, Music

“The act of treachery is an art, but the traitor himself is a piece of shit.”

Mike Tyson (1966) American boxer

As quoted in Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/boxing/3026999/Boxing-Tysons-complicated-world.html. Miscellaneous

“I said Philosophy might the rather maintain its place, as healing art for the soul, because then, the well would know that they had nothing to do with it. But as all arts love to make themselves more important than they are, so this art too has found means to impose itself upon all the world as indispensable. Like its sister art, which ministers to the body, it will not allow any one to be entirely well.”

Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) German writer, poet and publisher

Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813) Philosophy Considered As The Art Of Life And Healing Art Of The Soul P. 132

Love, World, Making love, Soul

“Few men have had their elasticity so thoroughly put to the proof as Caesar-- the sole creative genius produced by Rome, and the last produced by the ancient world, which accordingly moved on in the path that he marked out for it until its sun went down. Sprung from one of the oldest noble families of Latium--which traced back its lineage to the heroes of the Iliad and the kings of Rome, and in fact to the Venus-Aphrodite common to both nations--he spent the years of his boyhood and early manhood as the genteel youth of that epoch were wont to spend them. He had tasted the sweetness as well as the bitterness of the cup of fashionable life, had recited and declaimed, had practised literature and made verses in his idle hours, had prosecuted love-intrigues of every sort, and got himself initiated into all the mysteries of shaving, curls, and ruffles pertaining to the toilette-wisdom of the day, as well as into the still more mysterious art of always borrowing and never paying. But the flexible steel of that nature was proof against even these dissipated and flighty courses; Caesar retained both his bodily vigour and his elasticity of mind and of heart unimpaired. In fencing and in riding he was a match for any of his soldiers, and his swimming saved his life at Alexandria; the incredible rapidity of his journeys, which usually for the sake of gaining time were performed by night--a thorough contrast to the procession-like slowness with which Pompeius moved from one place to another-- was the astonishment of his contemporaries and not the least among the causes of his success. The mind was like the body. His remarkable power of intuition revealed itself in the precision and practicability of all his arrangements, even where he gave orders without having seen with his own eyes. His memory was matchless, and it was easy for him to carry on several occupations simultaneously with equal self-possession. Although a gentleman, a man of genius, and a monarch, he had still a heart. So long as he lived, he cherished the purest veneration for his worthy mother Aurelia (his father having died early); to his wives and above all to his daughter Julia he devoted an honourable affection, which was not without reflex influence even on political affairs. With the ablest and most excellent men of his time, of high and of humbler rank, he maintained noble relations of mutual fidelity, with each after his kind. As he himself never abandoned any of his partisans after the pusillanimous and unfeeling manner of Pompeius, but adhered to his friends--and that not merely from calculation--through good and bad times without wavering, several of these, such as Aulus Hirtius and Gaius Matius, gave, even after his death, noble testimonies of their attachment to him.”

Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) German classical scholar, historian, jurist, journalist, politician, archaeologist and writer

Vol.4. Part 2.
The History of Rome - Volume 4: Part 2

Love, Life, Death, Wisdom

“Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient. To act is easy, to think is hard; to act according to our thought is troublesome. Every beginning is cheerful: the threshold is the place of expectation. The boy stands astonished, his impressions guide him: he learns sportfully, seriousness comes on him by surprise. Imitation is born with us: what should be imitated is not easy to discover. The excellent is rarely found, more rarely valued. The height charms us, the steps to it do not: with the summit in our eye, we love to walk along the plain. It is but a part of art that can be taught: the artist needs it all. Who knows it half, speaks much, and is always wrong: who knows it wholly, inclines to act, and speaks seldom or late. The former have no secrets and no force : the instruction they can give is like baked bread, savory and satisfying for a single day; but flour cannot be sown, and seed-corn ought not to be ground. Words are good, but they are not the best. The best is not to be explained by words. The spirit in which we act is the highest matter. Action can be understood and again represented by the spirit alone. No one knows what he is doing while he acts aright, but of what is wrong we are always conscious. Whoever works with symbols only is a pedant, a hypocrite, or a bungler. There are many such, and they like to be together. Their babbling detains the scholar: their obstinate mediocrity vexes even the best. The instruction which the true artist gives us opens the mind; for, where words fail him, deeds speak. The true scholar learns from the known to unfold the unknown, and approaches more and more to being a master.”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Book VII Chapter IX
Wilhelm Meister's Wanderjahre (Journeyman Years) (1821–1829)

Love, Life, Secret, Making love

“There is beauty in art, in literature, in science, and in every triumph of intelligence, all of which I covet for my country; but there is a higher beauty still—in relieving the poor, in elevating the downtrodden, and being a succor to the oppressed. There is true grandeur in an example of justice, in making the rights of all the same as our own, and beating down the prejudice, like Satan, under our feet.”

Charles Sumner (1811–1874) American abolitionist and politician

Memoir and Letters of Charles Sumner, Volume 4, p. 500, also cited in W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), p. 592

Making love, Justice, Beauty, Intelligence

“In the final analysis, in science, unlike art, the individual hardly matters.”

Carl Djerassi (1923–2015) American chemistry professor, inventor, author, playwright

Science

“Art has a breadth which encompasses all the forms of creativeness, in drama, poetry, dance, fine arts, music, and literature. Art is not the picture you see before you. Pictures are the products of art.”

Harvey Dwight Dash (1924–2002) American art educator

[Pictures Called Products Of Art., The Record, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harvey_Dwight_Dash_(1924-2002)_in_The_Record_of_Hackensack,_New_Jersey_on_5_November_1959.png, November 5, 1959, Harvey Dwight Dash]
Quote

Music, Literature, Dance

“Prayer is also an art, an exercise of beauty, of song, of inner liberation. It is ascesis and ascent, it is a rigorous effort, but also a gentle and free flight of the soul toward God.”

Gianfranco Ravasi (1942) Catholic cardinal

Foreword
The Encounter: Discovering God Through Prayer (2014)

God, Beauty, Exercises, Soul

“Offer with me reverently a tribute to the manes of the holy, rejected Spinoza. The high World-Spirit pervaded him; the Infinite was his beginning and his end; the Universe was his only and his everlasting love. In holy innocence and in deep humility he beheld himself mirrored in the eternal world, and perceived how he also was its most worthy mirror. He was full of religion, full of the Holy Spirit. Wherefore, he stands there alone and unequalled; master in his art, yet without disciples and without citizenship, sublime above the profane tribe.”

Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch philosopher

Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers (1799) [original in German]
S - Z

Love, World, Making love, Religion

“The art of the parenthesis is one of the great secrets of eloquence in Society.”

Nicolas Chamfort (1741–1794) French writer

L’art de la parenthèse est un des grands secrets de l’éloquence dans la Société.
Maximes et Pensées, #243
Maximes and Thoughts, #243

Secret

“There were limits to what art—composed of such genres as portraiture, landscape, still life, and historical painting (the latter of which, in royal academies, enjoyed the highest esteem)—could do to show movement.”

Arthur Danto (1924–2013) American art critic and philosopher

What Art Is (2013), Chap. 1 : Wakeful Dreams

Life, Painting

“The purpose of the State is, as we have already shown in our last lecture, no other than that of the Human Race itself:-to order all its relations according to the Laws of Reason. It is only after the Age of Reason as Science shall have been traversed, and we shall have arrived at the Age of Reason as Art, that the State can reflect upon this purpose with clear consciousness. Till then it constantly promotes this purpose, but without its own knowledge, or free pre meditated design; prompted thereto by the natural law of the development of our Race, even while it has a totally different purpose in view;—with which purpose of its own, Nature has indissolubly bound up the purpose of the whole Race.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 168

Age, Law, Nature, Knowledge

“We arrived at five great Epochs of the Earthly Life of the Human Race, which are the only possible Epochs thereof, and thoroughly exhaust the whole of this Life:–First, That in which human affairs are governed by Reason as Instinct without violence or constraint. Second, That in which this Instinct has become weaker, and now only manifests itself in a few chosen Individuals, and thereby becomes an External Ruling Authority in reference to all the rest. Third, That in which this Authority is thrown off; and, with it, Reason in every shape which it has yet assumed. Fourth, That in which Reason in the shape of Science appears among men. Fifth, That in which Art associates itself with this Science, in order to mold Human Life with a firmer and surer hand into harmony with Science, and in which the ordering of all the relations of Man according to Reason is, by means of this Art, freely accomplished, the object of the Earthly Life attained, and our Race enters upon the higher spheres of Eternity.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) German philosopher

Source: The Characteristics of the Present Age (1806), p. 64

Life, Men, Appearance, Relation ships

“I veil my face before thee, and lay my finger on my lips. What thou art in thyself, or how thou appearest to thyself, I can never know. After living through a thousand lives, I shall comprehend Thee as little as I do now in this mansion of clay. What I can comprehend, becomes finite by my mere comprehension, and this can never, by perpetual ascent, be transformed into the infinite, for it does not differ from it in degree merely, but in kind. By that ascent we may find a greater and greater man, but never a God, who is capable of no measurement.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man

Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p.115
The Vocation of Man (1800), Faith

God

“Spirit: Do not be deceived by sophists and half philosophers; things do not appear to thee by means of any representatives. Of the thing that exists, and that can exist, thou art conscious immediately; thou, thyself, art that of which thou art conscious. By a fundamental law of thy being thou art thus presented to thyself, and thrown out of thyself.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man

Jane Sinnett, trans 1846 p. 53
The Vocation of Man (1800), Knowledge

Law, Appearance

“It is the most obvious fact that Jerzy Vetulani is an extraordinary personality who masterfully combines deep knowledge with the art of rhetoric, form and beauty of expression. But I have trouble answering the question: Who is Professor Vetulani really? There is no doubt that he is an eminent scholar, a star of Polish science, but he is also an unconventional man – what shocked me two years ago when he marched in the first line of the Cannabis Legalization March.”

Jerzy Vetulani (1936–2017) Polish scientist

Jacek Purchla, art historian, director of the International Cultural Centre in Kraków and the President of the Polish National Commission for UNESCO. An introduction to Vetulani's lecture during the GAP Symposium in Szczyrk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtGOlcQaIdM (in Polish), January 2016.

Beauty, Star, Question, Knowledge

“We leave the question whether a man shall be a brain or hand worker entirely to him to settle. At the end of the term of three years as a common laborer, which every man must serve, it is for him to choose, in accordance to his natural tastes, whether he will fit himself for an art or profession, or be a farmer or mechanic. If he feels that he can do better work with his brains than his muscles, he finds every facility provided for testing the reality of his supposed bent, of cultivating it, and if fit of pursuing it as his avocation. The schools of technology, of medicine, of art, of music, of histrionics, and of higher liberal learning are always open to aspirants without condition.”

Edward Bellamy (1850–1898) American author and socialist

Source: Looking Backward, 2000-1887 http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25439 (1888), Ch. 7.

School, Music, Feeling, Question

“It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.”

George Santayana (1863–1952) 20th-century Spanish-American philosopher associated with Pragmatism

https://owlquote.com/quotes/it-is-veneer-rouge-5g358g7
Other works

Making love, Football

“What do you believe was on the mind of the ancient Romans that they called the arts of speaking humanity?”

Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) German reformer

They judged that, indisputably, by the study of these disciplines not only was the tongue refined, but also the wildness and barbarity of people’s minds was amended.
Source: Praise of Eloquence (1523), p. 66

“The very idea of philosopher as art curator deeply interests me. One swiftly dreams of what Gilles Deleuze might have done with the opportunity to curate an art exhibition at MoMA: Art and Alloverness perhaps?”

Joseph Nechvatal (1951) American artist

Or Michel Foucault: the New Panopticons at the Centre Georges Pompidou? What would Susan Sontag or Roland Barthes have done at the International Center of Photography or at the Tate? What could Friedrich Nietzsche have done at the Louvre Museum? What indeed could Georges Bataille have haughtily done at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Joseph Nechvatal. " Painting and Philosophy: An Assessment http://hyperallergic.com/90646/painting-and-philosophy-an-assessment/," at hyperallergic.com, October 28, 2013

Dreams, Idea

“Art before the modern period is as much art as Neanderthal man is man.”

Joseph Kosuth (1945) American conceptual artist

It is for this reason that around the same time I replaced the term "work" for art proposition. Because a conceptual work of art in the traditional sense, is a contradiction in terms.
Joseph Kosuth. (1969), as cited in: Claude Gintz, ‎Musée d'Art Moderne Paris (1989). L'Art conceptuel, une perspective: exposition au Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris, 22 nov. 1989 - 18 fév. 1990. p. 42

“The case is a simple one. A mere increase in the variety of our material consumption relieves the strain imposed upon man by the limits of the material universe, for such variety enables him to utilise a larger proportion of the aggregate of matter. But in proportion as we add to mere variety a higher appreciation of those adaptations of matter which are due to human skill, and which we call Art, we pass outside the limits of matter and are no longer the slaves of roods and acres and a law of diminishing returns.”

J.A. Hobson (1858–1940) English economist, social scientist and critic of imperialism

So long as we continue to raise more men who demand more food and clothes and fuel, we are subject to the limitations of the material universe, and what we get ever costs us more and benefits us less. But when we cease to demand more, and begin to demand better, commodities, more delicate, highly finished and harmonious, we can increase the enjoyment without adding to the cost or exhausting the store. What artist would not laugh at the suggestion that the materials of his art, his colours, clay, marble, or what else he wrought in, might fail and his art come to an end? When we are dealing with qualitative, i.e. artistic, goods, we see at once how an infinite expenditure of labour may be given, an infinite satisfaction taken, from the meagrest quantity of matter and space. In proportion as a community comes to substitute a qualitative for a quantitative standard of living, it escapes the limitations imposed by matter upon man. Art knows no restrictions of space or size, and in proportion as we attain the art of living we shall be likewise free.
The Evolution of Modern Capitalism: A Study of Machine Production (1906), Ch. XVII Civilisation and Industrial Development

Law, Universe

“There’s about 30 full time volunteers here who are really fighting to try to raise the level of true independent art and make a point that this festival has become dominated by real elitist force because they have a top-heavy bureaucrat, just like the American government, just like the major media conglomerates. The guys at the top who are all making a shit load of money and they’re driving the people below them into oblivion, into poverty.”

Lloyd Kaufman (1945) American film director

CraveOnline http://www.craveonline.com/film/articles/507781-exclusive-cannes-interview-lloyd-kaufman-on-nuke-em-high May 28, 2013 2013

Money, People, Making love, Guy

“He was a phenomenal person, compassionate, sensitive, caring and broad-minded. He was instrumental in revitalizing an ancient art and taking it to an international level.”

B.K.S. Iyengar (1918–2014) Indian yoga teacher and scholar

Harit Iyengar, his grandson
Yogacharya B.K.S. Iyengar passes away at 95

Personality

“I have the honour to inform you that the Minister of Culture and Communication, Renaud Donnedieu De Vabres, has conferred on you the award of Chevalier des Arts et Lettres (Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters). This award honours those who have distinguished themselves in the field of art and have contributed to spread of culture in France and throughout the world.”

M. Balamuralikrishna (1930–2016) Carnatic vocalist, instrumentalist and playback singer

Dominique Girard, French Ambassador to India in: French honour for Balamuralikrishna http://www.hindu.com/2005/05/03/stories/2005050312101300.htm, The Hindu, 3 May 2005.

World, Communication

“For this reason neighborhoods should be American and a combination of the best of all the races that live in them. It is here that the school can become the conference center and the council chamber. It is the one American institution to be found in every town free, neutral, and powerful. During the daytime it has the children who can interpret it; during the evening it may have the parents who need it for their community expression. From the schoolhouse come the beliefs that living conditions should be decent, that laws should be enforced for all alike, that there should be no racial discriminations. From participation in neighborhood activities and in governing their own communities, the immigrant will grow into the larger responsibilities of State and nation. In order that American political ideals should be understood by him, they must be lived within his consciousness, in the small radius of his neighborhood, and in that way he must see exemplified whatever American literature, art, music, and science have to give.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

Children, School, Law, Music

“Very few rulers could come anywhere near Swati Tirunal in his patronage of arts, his catholicity of religous outlook, his transcendence of narrow regional, religious and caste barriers. He was truly a evolved royal sage.”

Swathi Thirunal Rama Varma (1813–1846) Maharajah of Travencore

V. K. Subramanian (2013), in "101 Mystics of India", p, 181
About Swathi Thirunal

“His views on matters of fine art were appreciated by everyone not only in India but also abroad.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

V.V.Giri, in "Maharajah of music"

“Discover how Kapoor’s continual experimentation with structure and medium has led him to work with a wide variety of materials from clay, fibreglass and paint pigment, to steel and wax, creating beautiful, strange and intriguing works that counter conventional ideas of art.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

The Museum of Contemporary Art on Kapoor’s first major exhibition in Australia.
Exhibition: Anish Kapoor

Beauty, Idea, Painting

“This is why Kapoor and Balmond have emerged as embattled heroes of public art. Their Orbit tower is not consensual, or easy to make sense of. It is wild and unexpected. It is, I believe, the most exciting British public artwork since House. Those who commissioned and created it deserve acclaim for choosing electricity over dull consensus.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Anish Kapoor's Olympic Park sculpture sends public art into Orbit

Making love, Sense, Housing

“Art in India was never the same after her comet like appearance. There are only a few moments in the history of art which pinpoint a new departure, a new direction. Such a moment in the history of modern Indian art was the appearance in the mid-thirties of Amrita Sher-Gil with whose paintings contemporary paintnig in India took shape and demonstrated the possibility of a contemporary style and expression that were, at the same time, of the soil and in direct continuation of the great national past.”

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) Hungarian Indian artist

Ruby Von Leiden in amrita Sher-Gil (1913-1941), 7 December 2013, Learnpunjabi.org http://www.learnpunjabi.org/eos/AMRITA%20SHER-GIL%20%281913-1941%29.html,

History, Departure, Appearance, Time

“His passing away is not only a great loss to the sports fraternity but that to the nation as avery popular man of art and culture and a great national political leader.”

Sunil Dutt (1929–2005) Hindi film actor

Randhir Singh (Indian Olympic Association Chairman)

Sport, Loss

“It has been more than three decades but Hema Malini’s passion for dance has not diminished. Starting in the early 70s with solo Bhratanatyam performances, the diva has reinvented herself at every stage of her career. When she felt that the pure classical dance form would not be appreciated by a less aware audience, she expanded her art form to include ballets.”

Hema Malini (1948) Indian actress, dancer and politician

Writer Bhawana Somaaya in [Bhawana Somaaya, Fragmented Frames: Reflections of a Critic, http://books.google.com/books?id=HQ3Yi9VPU8QC&pg=PP201, 1 January 2008, Pustak Mahal, 978-81-223-1016-0, 201–]

Passion, Dance

“A full flowering of the arts is only possible when Literature and Art, Philosophy and Science interact with one another. Kalakshetra is among the very few institutions where all such disciplines interact.”

Rukmini Devi Arundale (1904–1986) Indian Bharatnatyam dancer

About Rukmini Devi

Flowers, Literature, Science

“Quotes from: Leslie Martin, Ben Nicholson and N. Gabo (eds.) Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art.”

Naum Gabo (1890–1977) Russian sculptor

London: Faber and Faber
1936 - 1977, Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, 1937

Quotes

“According to the traditional interpretation Plato’s attitude against rhetoric is a rejection of the doxa, or opinion, and of the impact of images, upon which the art of rhetoric relies; at the same time his attitude is considered as a defense of the theoretical, rational speech, that is, of episteme.”

Ernesto Grassi (1902–1991) Italian philosopher

The fundamental argument of Plato’s critique of rhetoric usually is exemplified by the thesis, maintained, among other things, in the Gorgias, that only he who "knows" [epistatai] can speak correctly; for what would be the use of the "beautiful," of the rhetorical speech, if it merely sprang from opinions [doxa], hence from not knowing? … Plato’s … rejection of rhetoric, when understood in this manner, assumes that Plato rejects every emotive element in the realm of knowledge. But in several of his dialogues Plato connects the philosophical process, for example, with eros, which would lead to the conclusion that he attributes a decisive role to the emotive, seen even in philosophy as the absolute science.
Source: Rhetoric as Philosophy (1980), p. 28

Time

“All art is probably erotic in its ultimate character, but painting more than anything else is a purely nervous erotic activity… The eroticism of Caravaggio is special because it exists in that area between the simple sensual appreciation of the object which produces the desire to posses it, and the passionate but detached concern of the Observer, which also seeks to posses but to posses through understanding.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

Some Notes on Caravaggio (1956)

Understanding, Passion, Painting

“English: For his high level of work, a contribute for the Albanian art and for preparing the new generation of artists.”

Sadik Kaceli (1914–2000) Albanian artist

Për nivel të lartë në krijimtari, një kontribut në shquar në artet figurative Shqiptare dhe një ndihmë të pakursyer në përgatitjen e brezave të artistëve të rinj.
Sali Berisha, President of Albania (22-03-1994)

“No one component of a film can have any meaning in isolation: it is the film that is the work of art.”

Andrei Tarkovsky book Sculpting in Time

And we can only talk about its components rather arbitrarily, dividing it up artificially or the sake of theoretical discussion.
Source: Sculpting in Time (1986), p. 114

“I definitely know people who are shameless enough to give up basic values. I see this kind of art, and when I see it I feel ashamed. In China they treat art as some form of decoration, a self-indulgence. It is pretending to be art. It looks like art. It sells like art. But it is really a piece of shit.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei: ‘Shame on Me.’, 2011

People, Feeling, Self-confidence

“I will dwell a little longer on his character; for it was of a very extraordinary composition. He began to make a considerable figure very early. … He had a wonderful faculty in speaking to a popular assembly, and could mix both the facetious and the serious way of arguing very agreeably. He had a particular talent to make others trust to his judgment, and depend on it: and he brought over so many to a submission to his opinion, that I never knew any man equal to him in the art of governing parties, and of making himself the head of them. He was, as to religion, a deist at best.”

Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury (1621–1683) English politician and Earl

Gilbert Burnet, in Bishop Burnet's History of His Own Time (1823), Vol. I, p. 164
About Anthony Ashley-Cooper

Making love, Religion, Way, Dependency

“I believe that at times such as these my modest efforts may be useful to mankind. I have shown how the new art has succeeded in bringing about pure relationships, and furthermore how these can be created in day-to-day life.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Mondrian tried to convince the Dutch publisher Stols to publish his new manuscript 'L'art et la vie'
In a letter to A. M. Stols, 26 March 1932; as quoted in Mondrian, - The Art of Destruction, Carel Blotkamp, Reaktion Books LTD. London 2001, p. 222
1930's

Life, Effort, Time

“A particular thought is not the same as a concentrated, creative thought, which is actually a feeling of inward-looking calm. The former produces a descriptive and morpho-plastic art, the latter a purely plastic manifestation. It is a question of the universal versus the individual.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Mondrian refers to André Gide's 'Dada', in 'Nouvelle Revue Francaise', 1 April 1920
As quoted by the editors of 'The New Art – The New Life', op. cit. (Intro., note 1), p. 395, note 8
1920's

Feeling, Question, Universe

“Manson arrived at the déjeuner given by the minister of Beaux Arts fantastically drunk—punctuated the ceremony with cat-calls and cock-a-doodle-doos, and finally staggered to his feet, hurled obscene insults at the company in general and the minister in particular, and precipitated himself on the ambassadress, Lady Phipps, some say with amorous intent others with lethal intent… the guests fled ices uneaten, coffee undrunk… I hope an example will be made, and that they will seize the opportunity for turning the sot out of the Tate, not because he is a sot, but because he has done nothing but harm to modern painting.”

James Bolivar Manson (1879–1945) British artist

Clive Bell, quoted in Frances Spalding, The Tate: A History (1998), pp. 62–70. Tate Gallery Publishing, London. ISBN 1854372319.

Hope, Cats, Coffee, Painting

“If anyone from Austrian fine art of the last fifty years could be called a star, then there is only one person who meets all the criteria: Gottfried Helnwein.”

Gottfried Helnwein (1948) Austrian photographer and painter

Presence and Time: Gottfried Helnwein's Pictures http://www.helnwein-museum.com/article2534.html, Stella Rollig, director of the Lentos Museum of Modern Art Linz, 2006

Star, Personality

“Santiago is the today and tomorrow of Latin American Art. His exquisite line and masterful talent are a great asset for his native Colombia.”

Santiago Martínez Delgado (1906–1954) Colombian Muralist, Painter and Illstrator

Edgar Kaufmann conversation, letter to Edgar Kaufmann Jr, 1932, Wis.
About Martinez

“The art world is really exactly the same as the sex industry: you have to be completely on guard, you will get shafted, fucked over left, right and centre. And you will also meet charming, wonderful people like a rainbow at the end of the day.”

Stella Vine (1969) English artist

Source: David Smith, "Art? It's like the sex trade", http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,1759321,00.html The Observer, (2006-04-23) : On the art world.

People, World, Sex

“The most perfect art was Greek art. Raphael is the greatest of all masters in painting.”

Emil Nolde (1867–1956) German artist

Such were the doctrines of every art teacher only twenty or thirty years ago.
1.
1900 - 1920, On Primitive Art – Emil Nolde, 1912

Painting, Perfection

“The spectator experiences the phenomenon of transmutation; through the change from inert matter into a work of art, an actual transubstantiation has taken place... All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work into contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote from The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Sel) e.d. Michel Sanouille and Elmer Peterson, New York 1973, pp. 139-140
posthumous

World, Change

“Let us consider two important factors, the two poles of the creation of art: the artist on one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes the posterity; to all appearances the artist acts like a mediumistic being who, from the labyrinth beyond time and space, seeks his way out to a clearing.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

1951 - 1968, The Creative Act', 1957

Way, Appearance, Time

“Warmed by the instincts of a knightly heart, That roused at once if insult touched the realm, He spurned each Statecraft, each deceiving art, And met his foes, no vizor to his helm. This proved his worth; hereafter be our boast: Who hated Britons hated him the most.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Bernal Osborne adapting a Bulwer-Lytton poem at a speech to the Reform Club, 1850

Hate, Heart

“If we make any kind of decent, useful life for ourselves we have less need to run from it to those diminishing pleasures of the movies. When we go to the movies we want something good, something sustained, we don’t want to settle for just a bit of something, because we have other things to do. If life at home is more interesting, why go to the movies? And the theatres frequented by true moviegoers — those perennial displaced persons in each city, the loners and the losers — depress us. Listening to them — and they are often more audible than the sound track — as they cheer the cons and jeer the cops, we may still share their disaffection, but it’s not enough to keep us interested in cops and robbers. A little nose-thumbing isn’t enough. If we’ve grown up at the movies we know that good work is continuous not with the academic, respectable tradition but with the glimpses of something good in trash, but we want the subversive gesture carried to the domain of discovery. Trash has given us an appetite for art.”

Pauline Kael book Going Steady

Going Steady (1969), Trash, Art and the Movies (February 1969)

Life, Pleasure, Making love, Home

“It is ugly ducklings, grown either into swans or into remarkably big, remarkably ugly ducks, who are responsible for most works of art; and yet how few of these give a truthful account of what it was like to be an ugly duckling!—it is almost as if the grown, successful swan had repressed most of the memories of the duckling’s miserable, embarrassing, magical beginnings.”

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

The memories are deeply humiliating in two ways: they remind the adult that he was once more ignorant and gullible and emotional than he is; and they remind him that he once was, potentially, far more than he is.
“An Unread Book”, p. 19
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

Truth, Memory, Success

“Or Berlusconi, in Italy, right; the envy of the world, Italy, in terms of history, art and culture, 98 different political parties, and they still managed to elect him!”

Dylan Moran (1971) Irish actor and comedian

He’s so fucking crooked he sleeps on a spiral staircase! So thoroughly corrupt, every time he smiles an angel gets gonorrhoea! He's had so many face-lifts, his face has moved to the top of his head, you have to get on a step-ladder to watch him lie!
On Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
What It Is (2009)

World, History, Envy

“We, Seth, Emperor of Azania, Chief of Chiefs of Sakuyu, Lord of Wanda and Tyrant of the Seas, Bachelor of the Arts of Oxford University, being in this the twenty-fourth year of our life, summoned by the wisdom of Almighty God and the unanimous voice of our people to the throne of our ancestors, do hereby proclaim...”

Evelyn Waugh book Black Mischief

Seth paused in his dictation and gazed out across the harbour where in the fresh breeze of early morning the last dhow was setting sail for the open sea. "Rats," he said; "stinking curs. They are all running away."
First lines
Black Mischief (1932)

Life, Wisdom, God, People

“Film has dream, film has music. No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul. A little twitch in our optic nerve, a shock effect: twenty-four illuminated frames in a second, darkness in between, the optic nerve incapable of registering darkness. At the editing table, when I run the trip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood: in the darkness of the wardrobe, I slowly wind one frame after another, see almost imperceptible changes, wind faster — a movement.”

Ingmar Bergman book Laterna Magica

Laterna Magica (1987); The Magic Lantern : An Autobiography as translated by Joan Tate (1988).
Variant translation: Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.
As quoted in "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" by John Berger, Sight and Sound (June 1991).

Dreams, Music, Feeling, Soul

“Garbo is lonely. She always has been and she always will be. She lives in the core of a vast aching aloneness. She is a great artist, but it is both her supreme glory and her supreme tragedy that art is to her the only reality. The figures of living men and women, the events of everyday existence, move about her, shadowy, unsubstantial. It is only when she breathes the breath of life into a part, clothes with her own flesh and blood the concept of a playwright, that she herself is fully awake, fully alive.”

Greta Garbo (1905–1990) Swedish-American actress

Marie Dressler, My Own Story as Told to Mildred Harrington (1934)

Life, Women, Men, Reality

“I am a necromancer, but not of the common sort, while others of the art raise the dead, I lay them to rest - or try too - and those that will not rest I bind, for I am Abhorsen…”

Garth Nix (1963) Australian fantasy writer

He turned to the baby again and added, almost with a note of surprise, "Father of Sabriel."
Source: Old Kingdom series (The Abhorsen Trilogy), Sabriel (1995), p. 14.

Dead

“And Festus said with a loud voice, Paul, thou art beside thyself.”

John Wesley (1703–1791) Christian theologian

Acts 26:24. And so say all the world, the men who know not God, of all that are of Paul’s religion: of every one who is so a follower of him as he was of Christ. It is true, there is a sort of religion, nay, and it is called Christianity too, which may be practised without any such Imputation, which is generally allowed to be consistent with common sense, —that is, a religion of form, a round of outward duties, performed in a decent, regular manner. You may add orthodoxy thereto, a system of right opinions, yea, and some quantity of heathen morality; and yet not many will pronounce, that “much religion hath made you mad.” But if you aim at the religion of the heart, if you talk of “righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost,” then it will not be long before your sentence is passed, “Thou art beside thyself.” Sermon 37 "The Nature of Enthusiasm" http://www.ccel.org/ccel/wesley/sermons.v.xxxvii.html Sermons on Several Occasions (1771)

“The work of art is a stuffed crocodile.”

Alfred Jarry (1873–1907) French writer

L'objet d'art, par définition, est le crocodile empaillé.
Source: Alfred Jarry, Selected Works, edited by Roger Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor. Cape, London, 1965

“While the others had got married and moved out to suburbia, I had stayed in London and got into the arts scene through friends like Robert Fraser and Barry Miles and papers like The International Times.”

Paul McCartney (1942) English singer-songwriter and composer

We opened the Indica gallery with John Dunbar, Peter Asher and people like that. I heard about people like John Cage, and that he’d just performed a piece of music called 4’33” (which is completely silent) during which if someone in the audience coughed he would say, ‘See?’ Or someone would boo and he’d say, ‘See? It’s not silence—it’s music.’ I was intrigued by all of that. So these things started to be part of my life. I was listening to Stockhausen; one piece was all little plink-plonks and interesting ideas. Perhaps our audience wouldn’t mind a bit of change, we thought, and anyway, tough if they do! We only ever followed our own noses—most of the time, anyway. ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was one example of developing an idea.
The Beatles Anthology (2000), p. 212

Time

“When I was.... in the surroundings of pictures and things of art... I then had a violent passion for them... And I do not repent it, for even now, far from that land, I am often homesick for the land of pictures.”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Now for more than five years already, I do not know exactly how long, I'm more or less without employment, wandering here and there.. .But you will ask what is your definite aim? That aim becomes more definite, will stand out slowly and surely, as the rough draft becomes a sketch and the sketch becomes a picture.. .. my only anxiety is: how can I be of use in the world, cannot I serve some purpose and be of any good, how can I learn more and study profoundly certain subjects? In his letter to brother Theo, from Cuesmes, Belgium July 1880; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 133) p. 19 1880s, 1880

Passion

“Most works in realism tell a succession of such abject truths; they are deeply in earnest, every detail is true, and yet the whole finally tumbles to the ground — true but without significance. How did Jane Austen save her novels from that danger? They appear to be compact of abject truth. Their events are excruciatingly unimportant; and yet, with R. Crusoe, they will probably outlast all Fielding, Scott, George Elliot, Thackeray, and Dickens. The art is so consummate that the secret is hidden; peer at them as hard as one may; shake them; take them apart; one cannot see how it is done.”

Jane Austen (1775–1817) English novelist

Thornton Wilder, A preface for Our Town (1938)

Truth, Secret, Appearance, Success

“Can it be doubtful that this is still the rule of human education; that the human creature needs first of all to be educated not that he may speak, but that he may have something weighty and valuable to say! If speech is the bank-note of an inward capital of culture, of insight and noble human worth, then speech is precious, and the art of speech shall be honored. But if there is no inward capital; if speech represent no real culture of the mind, but an imaginary culture; no bullion, but the fatal and now almost hopeless deficit of such? Alas, alas, said bank-note is then a forged one; passing freely current in the market; but bringing damages to the receiver, to the payer, and to all the world, which are in sad truth infallible, and of amount incalculable.”

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

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

Truth, World, Education, Sadness

“Those only are happy (I thought) who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they find happiness by the way.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Autobiography (1873)

Happiness, Way

“He who will establish himself on a certain height must yield according to circumstances, like the weather-cock on a church-spire, which, though it be made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it remained obstinately immovable, and did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind. But a great man will never so far contradict his own feelings as to see, or, it may be, increase, with cold-blooded indifference, the misfortunes of his fellow country-men.”

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) German poet, journalist, essayist, and literary critic

English Fragments (1828), Ch. 11 : The Emancipation
Variant: The weather-cock on the church spire, though made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind.

Men, Feeling, Understanding, Weather

“This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty … what you will.”

Henry Miller book Tropic of Cancer

Source: Tropic of Cancer (1934), Chapter One

Love, God, Books, Making love

“Critique of art is not only useless, it is damaging. Art is an expression of self. It is the soul played out upon this physical world. And so, you can no more critique art, than you can critique the human soul. That is why (beyond simple technique that may enable an artist to further express their perspective) I do not believe in art school, for art and school are a serious contradiction in terms.”

Teal Swan (1984) American spiritual teacher

World, School, Soul, Self-confidence

“People may point to all of this as evidence that we humans are becoming more honest and truthful, but human nature does not change within a few generations. People have become more obvious and forthright not out of some deep moral calling but out of increasing self-absorption and overall laziness. It requires no effort to simply be oneself or to blast one’s message. And the lack of effort simply results in a lack of effect on other people’s psychology. It means that people’s interest in you will be paper thin. Their attention will quickly move on and you will not see the reason for this. Do not swallow the easy moralism of the day, which urges honesty at the expense of desirability. Go in the opposite direction. With so few people out there who understand the art of desirability, it affords you endless opportunities to shine and exploit people’s repressed fantasies.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 5 : Become an Elusive Object of Desire
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

People, Truth, Understanding, Nature

“Although styles of leadership change with the times, one constant remains: people are always ambivalent about those in power. They want to be led but also to feel free; they want to be protected and enjoy prosperity without making sacrifices; they both worship the king and want to kill him. When you are the leader of a group, people are continually prepared to turn on you the moment you seem weak or experience a setback. Do not succumb to the prejudices of the times, imagining that what you need to do to gain their loyalty is to seem to be their equal or their friend; people will doubt your strength, become suspicious of your motives, and respond with hidden contempt. Authority is the delicate art of creating the appearance of power, legitimacy, and fairness while getting people to identify with you as a leader who is in their service. If you want to lead, you must master this art from early on in your life. Once you have gained people’s trust, they will stand by you as their leader, no matter the bad circumstances.”

Robert Greene (1959) American author

Chap. 15 : Make Them Want to Follow You
The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

Life, Bad luck, People, Making love

“Youth is learning to read (which is all that one learns in school), and is learning where and how to find what he may later need to know (which is the best of the arts that he acquires in college). Nothing learned from a book is worth anything until it is used and verified in life; only then does it begin to affect behavior and desire. It is Life that educates, and perhaps love more than anything else in life.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

Fallen Leaves (2014)

Love, Life, Books, Youth

“when you confuse art with propaganda, you confuse an act of God with something which can be turned on and off like the hot water faucet. If "God" means nothing to you(or less than nothing)I'll cheerfully substitute one of your own favorite words,"freedom."”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

You confuse freedom—the only freedom—with absolute tyranny…
all over this socalled world,hundreds of millions of servile and insolent inhuman unbeings are busily unrolling in the enlightenment of propaganda.
Essay in the anthology The War Poets (1945) edited by Oscar Williams

God, Freedom, Water

“Because so many of our writers were born in ugly environments, in monstrous poverty and humilitation, they continue to assert that this is the natural environment, reality, and that beauty is artifice. Why should the natural state be ugliness? Natural to whom? We may be born in ugliness, but the natural consequences should be a thirst for its opposite. To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school. A hunger for the unknown, and an aspiration towards beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial.
We are born with the power to alter what we are given at birth.
When the Japanese paint flowers or the sea on a kimono they mean to establish a link with nature. But they select only what is beautiful in nature to maintain their love of life.
The creative personality never remains fixed on the first world it discovers. It never resigns itself to anything. That is the deepest meaning of rebellion, not the wearing of different clothes, haircuts, or the adopting of other cultures.”

Anaïs Nin book The Novel of the Future

The Novel of the Future (1969)

Love, Life, Hunger, World

“Science is not art. Yet, despite the lack of complete identity between art and science, there is much in common among different creative processes.”

Paul A. Samuelson (1915–2009) American economist

Introduction to the Enlarged Edition
1940s, Foundations of Economic Analysis (1947; 1983)

Science

“So often the story of rock’n’roll is told from a male perspective. So often it feels like men own music. And I still get as angry and frustrated about that as I ever did. Reading those women’s accounts of their lives has reminded me how much they paved the way back then. And history too often erases the women, in all art forms. Every single published story of a female artist goes a small way towards redressing the balance, and is another one saved from the fire.I didn’t try to be a soul singer, a jazz singer, a blues singer – no category…My music is my expression of what I feel and believe in a moment.”

Tracey Thorn (1962) English singer and songwriter

On women being excluded from music history in “Tracey Thorn: ‘I went through a phase of carrying Camus under my arm’” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/25/tracey-thorn-interview-another-planet-memoir in The Guardian (2020 Jan 25)

Women, Men, Music, Way

Quotes about art page 56

Quotes about art
page 56