“The course of Nature is the art of God.”
Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night IX, Line 1267.
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Edward Young 110
English poet 1683–1765Related quotes
“Art is Nature made by Man
To Man the interpreter of God.”
The Artist, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
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.
“Sacred art helps man find his own center, that kernel whose nature is to love God.”
[2007, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, World Wisdom, 28, 978-1-933316-42-0]
Spiritual life, Sacred art
“It is the same as an art course.”
Methods of Mathematics Applied to Calculus, Probability, and Statistics (1985)
Context: There is no unique, correct answer in most cases. It is a matter of taste, depending on the circumstances... and the particular age you live in.... Gradually, you will develop your own taste, and along the way you may occasionally recognize that your taste may be the best one! It is the same as an art course.
as quoted in "The man who got it right," The New York Review of Books, Volume 60, Number 13, August 15, 2013, p. 72
“There is no nature which is inferior to art, the arts imitate the nature of things.”
XI, 10
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book XI
“No form of Nature is inferior to Art; for the arts merely imitate natural forms.”
Meditations. xi. 10.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)