Great Throughts Treasury

"[Music is] the concealed art of computation for a soul unaware of its counting." - Gottfried Leibniz, fully Gottfried Wilhalm von Leibniz, Baron von Leibnitz

"Wherever deep experience attains intense expression, there is art." - Ludwig Lewisohn

"Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others." - Walter Lippmann

"The great art of learning is to understand but little at a time." - John Locke

"The essential function of art... is to become personally enlightened, wise, and whole. Then, as a consequence of the former function, the purpose of this wisdom, the purpose of art, is to make the community enlightened, wise, and whole." - Peter London

"The solution to the problems posed in art do not lie outside in the realms of technique and formula; they reside in the realm of fresh thinking about perennial issues, in honest feelings and awakened spirit." - Peter London

"Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in." - Amy Lowell, born Amy Lawrence Lowell

"The whole of art is an appeal to a reality which is not without us but in our minds." - Desmond MacCarthy, fully Sir Charles Otto Desmond MacCarthy

"All art is a revolt against man's fate." -

"Describes the professional artist as a morally suspect, even socially dangerous, conman, who from a deliberately chosen position of spiritual alienation, yet offers the ambiguous, self-serving products of his art, in expectation not only of support and remuneration, but also of social approval and even adoration as genius. [Paraphrased]" - Thomas Mann, fully Paul Thomas Mann

"All art worthy of the name is religious. Be it a creation of lines and colors, if it is not religious, it does not exist. If it is not religious, it is only a matter of documentary art, anecdotal art, which is no longer art." - Henri Matisse, birth name Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse

"Art is an antidote for violence. It gives the ecstasy, the self-transcendence that could otherwise take the form of drug addiction, terrorism, suicide, or warfare." -

"We receive love - from our children as well as others - not in proportion to our demands or sacrifices or needs, but roughly in proportion to our own capacity to love. And our capacity to love depends, in turn, upon our prior capacity to be persons in our own right. To love means, essentially, to give; and to give requires a maturity of self-feeling. Love is shown in the statement of Spinoza's... that truly loving God does not involve a demand for love in return. It is the attitude referred to by the artist Joseph Bender: "To produce art requires that the artist be able to love - that is to give without thought of being rewarded."" -

"Art does not imitate, but interpret." - Guiseppe Mazzini

""Real life" often appears, at least, to be an imitation of art. Today, it is poster art." - Marshall McLuhan, fully Herbert Marshall McLuhan

"Art can rise above mere handicraft only by being devoted to the expression of a lofty thought." - Felix Mendelssohn, fully Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy

"For art is nature made by man to man the interpreter of God." - Owen Meredith, pseudonym for Robert Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Earl of Lytton

"Thou art never at any time nearer to God than when under tribulation; which He permits for the purification and beautifying of thy soul." - Miguel de Molinos

"My trade and art is to live." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"Silence and modesty are very valuable qualities in the art of conversation." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"Art is the difference between seeing and just identifying." - Jean Mary Morman

"Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it." - Robert Motherwell

"Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity." - M. P. Moussorgsky, fully Modest Petrowitsch Mussorgski

"Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity." - Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky

"Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence." -

"Art is the proper task of life, art is life's metaphysical exercise... Art is worth more than truth." -

"Art raises its head where creeds relax." -

"Live life as a work of art." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"One finds in art the means whereby he may rejoice in his nature, another the means whereby he may temporarily overcome and escape from his nature. In accordance with these two needs, there are two kinds of art and artist." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"We have Art that we may not perish from Truth." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"The plays of natural lively children are the infancy of art. Children live in a world of imagination and feeling. They invest the most insignificant object with any form they please, and see in it whatever they wish to see." - Adam Gottlob Oehlenschlager

"Both the man of science and the man of art live always at the edge of mystery, surrounded by it. Both, as the measure of their creation, have always had to do with the harmonization of what is new and what is familiar, with the balance between novelty and synthesis, with the struggle to make partial order into total chaos... This cannot be an easy life." - Robert Oppenheimer, fully Julius Robert Oppenheimer

"Nature I believe in. True art aims to represent men and women, not as my little self would have them, but as they appear. My heroes and heroines I want not extreme types, all good or all bad; but human, mortal—partly good, partly bad. Realism I need. Pure mental abstractions have no significance for me. " - Ouida, pseudonym of Maria Louise Ramé, preferred to be called Marie Louise de la Ramée NULL

"The fine art of teaching is so to guide the growth of the learner that after each experience he is one step closer to maturity." -

"Content not thyself that thou art virtuous in the general; for one link being wanting, the chain is defective." - William Penn

"Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth." - Pablo Picasso, fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life." - Pablo Picasso, fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

"I do not evolve, I am. In art there is neither past nor future. Art that is not in the present will never be." - Pablo Picasso, fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

"We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize-at least, the truth that is given us to understand...Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing. Through art we express our conception of what nature is not." - Pablo Picasso, fully Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso

"Not all who perceive with eyes the sensible products of art are affected alike by the same object, but if they know it for the outward portrayal of an archetype subsisting in intuition, their hearts are shaken and they recapture memory of that Original." - Plotinus NULL

"All nature is but art, unknown to thee; all chance, direction, which thou canst not see; all discord harmony, not understood; all partial evil, universal good: and, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, one truth is clear, “Whatever is, is Right.”" - Alexander Pope

"Genius... in the capacity to see ten things where the ordinary man sees one, and where the man of talent sees two or three, plus the ability to register that multiple perception in the material of his art." -

"Good art weathers the ages because once in so often a man of intelligence commands the mass to adore it." -

"Prize not thyself by what thou hast, but by what thou art; he that values a jewel by its golden frame, or a book by its silver clasps, or a man by his vast estate, errs." - Francis Quarles

"The height of art is to conceal art." -

"Art is always the index of social vitality, the moving finger that records the destiny of a civilization. A wise statesman should keep an anxious eye on this graph, for it is more significant than a decline in exports or a fall in the value of a nation's currency." - Herbert Read, fully Sir Herbert Edward Read

"Art is not imitation, but illusion." - Charles Reade

"No theologian could ever be a historian. History is essentially disinterested. The historian has only one concern: art and truth, which are inseparable... whereas the theologian has something else at stake - his dogma." -

"The dream is an involuntary art of poetry." -