This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"To know how to grow old is the masterwork of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living." - Henri Frédéric Amiel
"In art, vitality is the chaotic initial state; beauty is the cosmic final state." - Chairil Anwar
"The purpose of art is not a rarefied, intellectual distillate - it is life, intensified, brilliant life." - Alain Arias-Misson
"Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity." - Daniel Barenboim
"I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction." - Saul Bellow
"Art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm… an arrest of attention in the mist of distraction." - Saul Bellow
"I feel that art has something to do with achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction." - Saul Bellow
"Love rests on the preservation of our species; art is our instinctive instrument for the preservation of the individual, of the unique man, woman and child, and the means of evolution of us all into something able and worthy of survival on the living earth." - Earle Birney, fully Earle Alfred Birney
"What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher, when, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the Infinite? Art’s life, - and where we live, we suffer and toil." - Elizabeth Browning, fully Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"The world is the book where eternal Wisdom wrote its own ideas, and the living temple where, depicting its own acts and likeness, it decorated the height and the depth with living statues; so that every spirit, to guard against profanity, should read and contemplate here art and government, and each should say: “I fill the universe, seeing God in all things.” But we, souls bound to books and dead temples, copied with many mistakes from the living, place these things before such instruction. O ills, quarrels, ignorance, labors, pains, make us aware of our falling away: O let us, in God’s name, return to the original." - Tommaso Campanella, baptized Giovanni Domenico Campanella
"Politics is not the art of the possible; it is the art of making possible what is necessary." - Jacques Chirac, fully Jacques René Chirac
"Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail." - Theodore Dreiser, fully Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion." - L. Francis Edmunds
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery – even if mixed with fear – that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their primitive forms are accessible to our minds – it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitutes true religiosity; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man." - Albert Einstein
"An important way to distinguish philosophy from religion is that philosophy, at its best, raises questions, whereas religion provides answers. Answers can sometimes lose their force, however, if the questions to which they provide answers have somehow been lost, muted, or superseded. But philosophy can never end. As long as we live, we are going to ask ourselves about the meaning of life. Some have written about the “end of philosophy.” It has been thought that philosophy exists only if you can construe life as a journey traveling to a new and different dimension. Some have said that the cognitive sciences, linguistics, neuroscience, and so forth will advance so much that traditional technical problems of philosophy will diminish. Insofar as philosophy is a pursuit of the art of living providing (often conflicting) guidance for living, there is a future for philosophy." - Stephen A. Erickson
"Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly: ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling, than to conjure away the burden and bitterness." - Gustave Flaubert
"The player of the inner game comes to value the art of relaxed concentration above all other skills; he discovers a true basis for self-confidence; and he learns that the secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard. He aims at the kind of spontaneous performance which occurs only when the mind is calm and seems at one with the body, which finds its own surprising ways to surpass its own limits again and again." - Tim Gallwey, fully W. Timothy Gallwey
"Who can deny that much that passes for science and art today destroys the soul instead of uplifting it and instead of evoking the best in us, panders to our basest passions?" - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"Art is revelation. If painting shows only what is there, it is not art. Art like fine music or high literature must carry the beholder beyond this world and all that appears in it, transport him to the shores of the eternal world and enable him to see and hear the things not given to the tongue of man to utter." - James M. Gillis
"Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving." - O. Henry, pen name for William Sydney Porter
"To be a Jew is to affirm the world without being enslaved to it; to be a part of civilization and to go beyond it; to conquer space and to sanctify time. Judaism is the art of surpassing civilization, sanctification of time, sanctification of history." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible." - Bell Hooks, pen name for Gloria Jean Watkins
"Politics is, among other things, the art of anticipating consequences." - Irving Howe
"The lineaments of the new religion that we can be sure will arise to serve the needs of the coming era... Instead of worshipping supernatural rulers, it will sanctify the higher manifestations of human nature, in art and love, in intellectual comprehension and aspiring adoration, and will emphasize the fuller realization of life’s possibilities as a sacred trust." - Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
"The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook." - William James
"To improve the golden moment of opportunity and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"I believe that art is the only way by which an evil man can attain a realm of perfect liberation without becoming an entirely different person. While religion spurns evil men… art permits them to enter its realm, as long as they believe in it." - Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
"As soon as religion becomes prosaic or perfunctory art appears somewhere else." - Susanne Langer, fully Susanne Katherina Langer née Knauth
"Life, like art, should be a celebration of a vision." - Michael Larsen
"The art of crisis management, now widely acknowledged to be the essence of statecraft, owes its vogue to the merger of politics and spectacle. Propaganda seeks to create in the public a chronic sense of crisis, which in turn justifies the expansion of executive power and the secrecy surrounding it." - Christopher Kit Lasch
"That which is static and repetitive is boring. That which is dynamic and random is confusing. In between lies art." - John Locke
"Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist." - René Margritte, fully René François Ghislain Magritte
"Music and art and poetry attune the soul to God because they induce a kind of contact with the Creator and Ruler of the Universe." - Thomas Merton
"The role of art is to express through the body the mystery of a soul. Through the body - that is to say by way of all the signs - visual, audible, mobile." - Jean Mouroux
"Eventually all successful storytelling technologies become “transparent”: we lose consciousness of the medium and see neither print nor film but only the power of the story itself. If digital art reaches the same level of expressiveness as these older media, we will no longer concern ourselves with how we are receiving information. We will only think about what truth it has told us about our lives." - Janet H. Murray
"One hundred years after its invention, film art still occupies a marginal place in academic circles. The very activity of watching television is routinely dismissed as inherently inferior to the activity of reading, regardless of content. But narrative beauty is independent of medium. Oral tales, pictorial stories, plays, novels, movies, and television shows can all range from the lame and sensationalist to the heartbreaking and illuminating. We need every available form of expression and all the new ones we can muster to help us understand who we are and what we are doing." - Janet H. Murray
"The mission of art is to achieve a deeper understanding of nature’s beauty. The mission, to put it another way, is to observe nature with an artistic mind, a mind bent on discovering beauty. Therefore, the kind of nature that the average person sees does not make art when it is reproduced." - Shiga Naoya
"Art is the sex of imagination." - George Jean Nathan
"Art is a technique of communication. The image is the most complete technique of all communication." - Claes Oldenburg
"All noble art, with all noble religion, breathes gratitude for life... Great art is a song of praise, an overflowing of life back to its source, a dithramb of thanksgiving and gratitude." - Alfred Richard Orage