In art only thing matters: that which cannot be explained.
-Georges Braque
You must be the change you want to see in the world.
-Mahatma Gandhi
The most beautiful and most profound emotion we can experience is the
sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science.
He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder
and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know what is impenetrable
to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the
most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in
the most primitive form. This knowledge, this feeling is at the center
of true religiousness.
-Albert Einstein
Only a person who participates in spiritual life has an impulse for
a creative activity transcending the merely natural. Otherwise, where
would the impulse come from? In all ages the human souls in which the
artistic element flourished have had a definite relation to the
spiritual world. It was out of a spirit-attuned state that the
artistic urge proceeded. And this relation to the spiritual world
will be, forever, the prerequisite for genuine creativity.
-Rudolf Steiner
The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines,
or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of
art of human character, -a wonderful expression through stone or canvas
or musical sound of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature,
and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these
attributes.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
All literature is yet to be written. Poetry has scarcely chanted its
first song. The perpetual admonition of nature to us is: The world is
new, untried. Do not believe the past. I give you the universe
a virgin today.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
As long as men make life miserable as it often is, Art and Religion
are the great supports for spiritual life. But Beauty and Truth
then are outside life. Growing humanity must bring them into life:
Realize Truth and Beauty. Then life becomes itself Beauty and Truth.
Then life itself is Art and Religion. Then Art and Religion is
superfluous. But destruction of Art and Religion is not the way:
Humanity’s progress is the way.
-Piet Mondriaan
Beauty is not something to achieve overtly. If the intent is pure
enough, the result will speak of beauty.
-Astrid Fitzgerald
Art, although produced by man’s hands, is something not created by
hands alone, but something which wells up from a deeper source out
of our soul. My sympathies in the literary as well as in the artistic
field are drawn most strongly to those artists in whom I see most the
working of the soul.
-Vincent van Gogh
Without music life would be a mistake.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Beautiful is always bizarre.
-Charles Baudelaire
Every journey we make leaves its mark on us.
-Marianne Alopaeus
Love is an art like music.
-Pierre Louijs
If the artist be a priest of beauty, nevertheless this beauty is to be
sought only according to the principle of the inner need, and can be
measured only according to the size and intensity of that need.
That is beautiful which is produced by the inner need, which springs
from the soul. Maeterlink, one of the first warriors, one of the first
modern artists of the soul, says: There is nothing on earth so curious
for beauty or so absorbent of it, as soul. For that reason few mortal
souls withstand the leadership of a soul which gives to them beauty.
-Wassily Kandinsky
Love is justly called the Ruler of the Arts, for a man fashions works
of art carefully and completes them thoroughly, who esteems highly
both the works themselves and the people for whom they are made.
There is, then, this fact, that artists in each of the arts
seek after and care for nothing but love.
-Marsilio Ficino
Who will deny that the creative power by which all living things are
begotten and brought forth is the very genius of Love? Do we not,
moreover, recognize that in every art and craft the artist and the
craftsman who work under the direction of this same god achieve the
brightest fame, while those that lack his influence grow old in
the shadow of oblivion?
-Plato
Three things are needed for beauty: wholeness, harmony, and radiance.
-Thomas Aquinas
We may..begin at once by asserting that artistic beauty stands higher
than nature. For the beauty of art is a beauty that is born, born again,
that is of the mind; and by as much as the mind and its products
are higher than nature and its appearances, by so much is the beauty
of art higher than the beauty of nature.
-G.W.F. Hegel
The beautiful is a manifestation of the secret laws of nature.
When nature begins to reveal her open secret to a person,
he feels an irresistible longing for her most worthy interpreter, art.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Joy and suffering are two equally precious gifts both of which must be
savored to the full, each one in its purity, without trying to mix them.
Through joy, the beauty of the world penetrates our soul.
Through suffering it penetrates our body.
-Simone Weil
Man surrenders so readily to the commonplace, his mind and his senses
are so easily blunted, so quickly shut to supreme beauty that we must
do all we can to keep the feeling for it alive. No one can do without
beauty entirely; it is only because people have never learned to enjoy
what is really good that they delight in what is flat and futile so
long as it’s new. One ought at least to hear a little melody every day,
read a fine poem, see a good picture, and, if possible,
make a few sensible remarks.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect
but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity.
The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.
-C. G. Jung
The mind is a tool, it is either clagged, bound, rusty, or it is a
clear way to and from the soul. An artist should not be afraid to know.
-Robert Henri
Art is the beginning of vision; it sees vastly more than the most
perfect apparatus can discover; and it senses the infinite invisible
facets of that crystal, one facet which we call man.
-P. D. Ouspensky
Each man has his vocation. The talent is the call.
There is one direction in which all space is open to him.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
One should arrive at leading one’s conscience to a stake of development
so that it becomes the voice of a higher self of which the ordinary
self is a servant.
-Vincent van Gogh
Without poets, without artists or musicians, men would soon weary of
nature’s monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would
collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature,
and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything
would break up in chaos. There would be no season, no civilizations,
no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent
void would reign everywhere.
-Guillaume Apollinaire
When a painter speaks he speaks badly, but when his painting speaks
it speaks well. Vain is that artist who seeks honour from anyone
rather than the work itself, for the virtue of a work does not
depend on him who judges it; rather does the work commend
the artist to the judge.
-Marsilio Ficino
Great works of art have endless leisure for a background, as universe
has space. Time stands still while they are created. The artist
cannot be in hurry. The earth moves round the sun with inconceivable
rapidity, and yet the surface of the lake is not ruffled by it.
-Henry David Thoreau
The futility of explanation:
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of
a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one,
without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people
have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist
works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world,
and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of
other things which please us in the world, though we can’t explain them.
People who try to explain pictures are usually
barking up the wrong tree.
-Pablo Picasso
To the poet all things are friendly and sacred, all events profitable,
all days holy, all men divine.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
A real artist may create his picture in a lonely desert.
He does not worry about who will look at his picture or whether anybody
at all will look at it, for he creates within a divine-spiritual
community. Gods look over his shoulder; he creates in their company.
What does he care whether or not anybody admires his picture.
A person may be an artist in complete loneliness.
-Rudolf Steiner
Art is there to be seen, not talked about, except perhaps
in its presence.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Artists who have won fame are embarrassed by it; thus their first works
are often their best.
-Ludwig van Beethoven
Success is dangerous.
One begins to copy oneself, and to copy oneself is more dangerous than
to copy others. It leads to sterility.
-Pablo Picasso
An artist spends himself like the crayon in his hand,
till he is all gone.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Art is runewriting of our own mystery.
The deeper the soul of a human being, the deeper is his love.
-Leonardo da Vinci
To Change Life.
-Arthur Rimbaud