This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon
Style supposes the reunion and the exercise of all the intellectual faculties. The style is the man.
One of the characteristics of great drawing is the artist's wholehearted acceptance of his own style and character. It is as if the drawing says for the artist, "Here I am."
Acceptance | Character | Style | Wisdom |
Whatever is pure is also simple. It does not keep the eye on itself. The observer forgets the window in the landscape it displays. A fine style gives the view of fancy--its figures, its trees, or its palaces,--without a spot.
Start with a style and you are in chains, start with an idea and you are free.
Style |
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
It is the fashion to style the present moment an extraordinary crisis.
Modern culture is defined by this extraordinary freedom to ransack the world storehouse and to engorge any and every style it comes upon. Such freedom comes from the fact that the axial principle of modern culture is the expression and remaking of the “self” in order to achieve self-realization and self-fulfillment. And in its search, there is a denial of any limits or boundaries to experience. It is a reaching out for all experience; nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored.
Culture | Experience | Freedom | Fulfillment | Nothing | Order | Search | Self | Self-realization | Style | World |
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.
Day | Existence | Future | God | History | Life | Life | People | Responsibility | Style | Will | God |
Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity - I meant he true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character, not that other simplicity which is only an euphemism for folly?
Beauty | Character | Folly | Good | Grace | Harmony | Mind | Simplicity | Style |
The essence of a free life is being able to choose the style of living you prefer free from exclusion and without the compulsion of conformity or law.
Conformity | Life | Life | Style |
I discovered that what's really important for a creator isn't what we vaguely define as inspiration or even what it is we want to say, recall, regret, or rebel against. No, what's important is the way we say it. Art is all about craftsmanship. Others can interpret craftsmanship as style if they wish. Style is what unites memory or recollection, ideology, sentiment, nostalgia, presentiment, to the way we express all that. It's not what we say but how we say it that matters.
To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can't be separated.
Style |
Beware you are not a fiery, persecuting enthusiast. Do not imagine that God has called you (just contrary to the spirit of Him you style your Master) to destroy men’s lives, and not to save them. Never dream of forcing men into the ways of God. Think yourself, and let think. Use no constraint in matters of religion. Even those who are farthest out of the way never compel to come in by any other means than reason, truth, and love.
Constraint | Destroy | God | Means | Men | Spirit | Style | God | Think |
Marcel Marceau, born Marcel Mangel
I have designed my style pantomimes as white ink drawings on black backgrounds, so that man's destiny appears as a thread lost in an endless labyrinth. I have tried to shed some gleams of light on the shadow of man startled by his anguish.