This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music, because, in its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression." - Walter Pater, fully Walter Horatio Pater
"All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life." - M. C. Richards, fully Mary Caroline Richards
"Cerebration is the enemy of originality in art." - Martin Ritt
"Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art." - Eleanor Roosevelt, fully Anna Eleanor Roosevelt
"The roots of ultimate insights are found not on the level of discursive thinking, but on the level of wonder and radical amazement, in the depth of awe, in our sensitivity to the mystery, in our awareness of the ineffable. It is the level on which the great things happen to the soul, where the unique insights of art, religion, and philosophy come into being." - Fritz A. Rothschild
"The lamps are different, but the Light is the same: it comes from beyond. O thou who art the kernel of Existence, the disagreement between Moslem, Zoroastrian and Jew depends on the standpoint." - Rumi, fully Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rumi NULL
"The art of policy is knowing when to act, how to act, through whom to act, with what tools to act, and for what purposes to act." - Dean Rusk, fully David Dean Rusk
"The illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but the exact opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal." - Françoise Sagan, born Francoise Quoirez
"The art of living is always to make a good thing out of a bad thing." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"True art is the intermediary between man’s ordinary nature and his higher potentialities." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher
"In the high art of serving others, workers sustain their morale, management keeps its customers, and the nation prospers. One of the indisputable lessons of life is that we cannot get or keep anything for ourselves alone unless we also get it for others." - James Richard Sneed
"Imagination without skills gives us modern art." - Tom Stoppard, fully Sir Tom Stoppard, born Tomáš Straüssler
"There is a difference between happiness and enjoyment. Happiness is the result of pursuing a goal. Pursuit of the goal generates an energizing sense of purpose. Enjoyment, on the other hand, is an immediate sensation of pleasure; a person can enjoy a piece of cake, a piece of art, a good joke – it gives pleasure but then passes." - Ezriel Tauber
"To do whatever is required of you in any situation without it becoming a role that you identify with is an essential lesson in the art of living that each one of us is here to learn. You become most powerful in whatever you do if the action is performed for its own sake rather than as a means to protect, enhance, or conform to your role identity." - Eckhart Tolle, born Ulrich Leonard Tolle
"The aim and end of war is murder; the weapons employed in war are espionage, treachery and the encouragement of treachery, the ruining of a country, the plundering and robbing of its inhabitants for the maintenance of the army, and trickery and lying which all appear under the heading of the art of war. The military world is characterized by the absence of freedom – in other words, a rigorous discipline – enforced inactivity, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness." - Leo Tolstoy, aka Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy or Tolstoi
"Mysticism is the art of union with Reality." - Evelyn Underhill
"A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it." - Simone Weil
"Art is its soliloquy." - Franz Werfel, fully Franz Viktor Werfel
"Art happens - no hovel is safe from it, no prince can depend on it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about." - James Abbott McNeill Whistler
"Learning to accede to smaller demands so as not to have to grant larger ones is part of the art of leadership. The difficulty is that narrow concessions may also spread into wide ones." - Aaron Wildavsky
"The art of arts it the art of loving. Nature itself and God, nature’s author, are its teachers. For love itself is given by the creator of nature, and unless its natural purity has been soiled by some adulterous affection, love teaches itself, I say, to its own disciples, to the disciples of God." - William of Saint Thierry NULL
"No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it."" - Leon Battista Alberti
"Art is not a means by which we escape from life, but a stratagem by which we conquer life's disorder." - Alfred Hamilton Barr, Jr.
"All art is a challenge to despair." - E. C. Bentley, fully Edmund Clerihew Bentley
"Art is meant to upset people, science reassures them." - Georges Braque
"Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down." - Malcolm de Chazal
"The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe." - David Hare, fully Sir David Hare
"If thou art a man, admire those who attempt great things, even though they fail." - Seneca the Elder, aka Lucius or Marcus Annaeus Seneca NULL
"To see what students learn in school, look at how they leave school. If they leave thinking that reading and writing are difficult and pointless, that mathematics is confusing, that history is irrelevant, and that art is a bore, then that is what they have been taught. People learn what is demonstrated to them, and this reality will not change to suit the convenience of politicians and educations administrators." - Frank Smith
"Vision is the art of seeing things invisible." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
"The art of peace does not rely on weapons or brute force to succeed; instead we put ourselves in tune with the universe, maintain peace in our own realms, nurture life, and prevent death and destruction. The true meaning of the term samurai is one who serves and adheres to the power of love." - Morihei Ueshiba
"Politeness is the art of choosing among one's real thoughts." - Abel Stevens
"There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people." - Adam Smith
"The art of leadership... consists in consolidating the attention of the people against a single adversary and taking care that nothing will split up that attention." - Adolph Hitler
"Art is never didactic, does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon." - Agnes Repplier