“The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places…. It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.”

— William Torrey Harris

Source: The Philosophy of Education (His 1889 book)

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William Torrey Harris 2

American philosopher 1835–1909

Donald Phillip Verene (1937) philosopher

Source: Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (1997), p. 153

“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)

“We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

Regarding the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting
2012-12-13
Your World
Fox News
TV, quoted in * 2012-12-14
Huckabee: Schools "Become A Place Of Carnage" When "We Systematically Remove God"
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/video/2012/12/14/huckabee-schools-become-a-place-of-carnage-when/191864

“I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea.”

Saul Leiter (1923–2013) American photographer

As quoted in Saul Leiter (2008) by Agnès Sire
Context: I must admit that I am not a member of the ugly school. I have a great regard for certain notions of beauty even though to some it is an old fashioned idea. Some photographers think that by taking pictures of human misery, they are addressing a serious problem. I do not think that misery is more profound than happiness.

“This two-way transformation proceeds from metaphysical perceptions, for metaphysics is the search for the essential nature of reality. And so artistic creation is the metamorphosis of the external physical aspects of a thing into a self-sustaining spiritual reality. Such is the magic act which takes place continuously in the development of a work of art. On this and only on this is creation based.”

Hans Hofmann (1880–1966) American artist

'Search for the Real in the Visual Arts', p. 40
Search for the Real and Other Essays (1948)

“Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games; they encourage it in some schools.”

Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) Royal Navy officer and explorer

Last letter to his wife, quoted in Scott's Last Expedition (1913) vol.1, ch.20

“It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power”

Paul Dirac (1902–1984) theoretical physicist

The Evolution of the Physicist's Picture of Nature (1963)
Context: It seems to be one of the fundamental features of nature that fundamental physical laws are described in terms of a mathematical theory of great beauty and power, needing quite a high standard of mathematics for one to understand it. You may wonder: Why is nature constructed along these lines? One can only answer that our present knowledge seems to show that nature is so constructed. We simply have to accept it. One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe. Our feeble attempts at mathematics enable us to understand a bit of the universe, and as we proceed to develop higher and higher mathematics we can hope to understand the universe better.