“Art is man's nature; nature is God's art.”

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night IX, Line 1267.

Section 16
Religio Medici (1643), Part I

[2007, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, World Wisdom, 28, 978-1-933316-42-0]
Spiritual life, Sacred art

Source: 1940s, Abstract Art, Concrete Art (c. 1942), p. 118

XI, 10
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book XI

Meditations. xi. 10.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Part I, Essay 15: The Epicurean
Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (1741-2; 1748)

undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993)

The Origins of Art (1966)
Other Quotes
Context: What I am searching for... is some formula that would combine individual initiative with universal values, and that combination would give us a truly organic form. Form, which we discover in nature by analysis, is obstinately mathematical in its manifestations—which is to say that creation in art requires thought and deliberation. But this is not to say that form can be reduced to a formula. In every work of art it must be re-created, but that too is true of every work of nature. Art differs from nature not in its organic form, but in its human origins: in the fact that it is not God or a machine that makes a work of art, but an individual with his instincts and intuitions, with his sensibility and his mind, searching relentlessly for the perfection that is neither in mind nor in nature, but in the unknown. I do not mean this in an other-worldly sense, only that the form of the flower is unknown to the seed.