Great Throughts Treasury

"If the animals suddenly got the gift of laughter, they would begin by laughing at themselves sick about man, that most ridiculous, most absurd, most foolish of all animals."

"The difference between utility and utility plus beauty is the difference between telephone wires and the spider web"

"In nature, there is less death and destruction than death and transmutation. "

"Reduce the complexity of life by eliminating the needless wants of life, and the labors of life reduce themselves. "

"Clothe an idea in words and it loses its freedom of movement."

"Art is the subjective, preferential treatment of certain elements of reality; it selects and resets, distributes light and shade, omits and underlines, softens and emphasizes."

"Artists of all sorts remain youthful for so long, and in many cases attain a grand old age. The explanation is that they live in an almost permanent condition of stimulation and excitement."

"We can never see the world other than incompletely: deliberately to see it as incomplete is to create an artistic aspect."

"God does not rule the world outwardly by gravitation and chemical affinity, but inwardly in the heart of man: as is your soul, so will the destiny be of the world in which you live and do."

"The highest, the only reality, is ever at hand, but for the most part invisible. Genius makes it visible... All knowing that goes beyond the immediate experience of the moment is a matter of faith."

"Observation of the first kind projects its own light on to things and can, therefore, only touch their surface; all it does is render its objects invisible. That of the second kind projects light into things and makes objects luminous in themselves."

"The artist's view of the world and mankind is that which seeks as far as possible to lose itself in its object, illuminating it not from the outside by some light foreign to it, but from within, deriving light from its own core."