“… A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.”

—  Guy De Maupassant

Source: Complete Works

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "… A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra." by Guy De Maupassant?
Guy De Maupassant photo
Guy De Maupassant 59
French writer 1850–1893

Related quotes

Ezra Pound photo

“Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can not be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.”

Ezra Pound (1885–1972) American Imagist poet and critic
Simone Weil photo

“It is precisely those artists and writers who are most inclined to think of their art as the manifestation of their personality who are in fact the most in bondage to public taste.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), Human Personality (1943), p. 57

Leo Tolstoy photo

“In spite the mountains of books written about art, no precise definition of art has been constructed. And the reason for this is that the conception of art has been based on the conception of beauty.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

Joan Baez photo

“With the precision of a hummingbird's heart
Was the lord of the monarch butterflies
One-time ruler of the world of art”

Joan Baez (1941) American singer

Caruso
Gulf Winds (1976)

Sarah Kofman photo

“The philosopher does not just ‘play’ with metaphors: his play is of a ‘formidable seriousness’, for it is designed to oppose modernity’s hatred for art, to obliterate precisely the opposition between play and seriousness, dream and reality.”

Sarah Kofman (1934–1994) philosopher from France

Source: Nietzsche et la métaphore (1972), p. 18

Fidel Castro photo

“The revolution cannot seek to stifle art or culture since one of the goals and fundamental aims of the revolution is to develop art and culture, precisely so that art and culture truly become the patrimony of the people.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Words to Intellectuals (1961)

“Folk-art signifies the poetical, musical and pictorial activities of those strata of the population which are uneducated and not urbanized or industrialised.”

Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) Hungarian art historian

Arnold Hauser, cited in: Bihar Tribal Research Institute (1961). Bulletin of the Bihar Tribal Research Institute. Vol. 3-4, p. 144

Linda Ronstadt photo

“For all families, participation in music and the arts, can help people reclaim and achieve the American dream.”

Linda Ronstadt (1946) American pop singer

Linda Ronstadt, Arts Advocacy Day 2009 Congressional Hearing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLo6o_ayKZ0, 1 May 2009

“Even if we can never quantify [satisfaction or happiness]… as precisely as we currently quantify GNP,… perhaps it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.”

Herman E. Daly (1938) American economist

Herman E. Daly and Joshua Farley, in Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications. (2003), page 234. quoted in Beyond GDP Measuring progress, true wealth, and the well-being of nations http://ec.europa.eu/environment/beyond_gdp/key_quotes_en.html, European Commission:Environment

“The large (in English) unphilosophical, 'poetic' or 'religious' questions are elicited from their precise and technical microcosms.”

John Hollander (1929–2013) American poet

Related topics