Great Throughts Treasury

"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."

"A man of personality can formulate ideals, but only a man of character can achieve them."

"Art in its widest sense is the extension of the personality: a host of artificial limbs."

"Art is an indecent exposure of the consciousness."

"Art is pattern informed by sensibility."

"But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group."

"Art is not and never has been subordinate to moral values. Moral values are social values; aesthetic values are human values. Morality seeks to restrain the feelings; art seeks to define them by externalizing them, by giving them significant form. Morality has only one aim – the ideal good; art has quite another aim – the objective truth... art never changes."

"Creeds and castes, and all forms of intellectual and emotional grouping, belong to the past."

"Fantasy is a product of thought, Imagination of sensibility. If the thinking, discursive mind turns to speculation, the result is Fantasy; if, however, the sensitive, intuitive mind turns to speculation, the result is Imagination. Fantasy may be visionary, but it is cold and logical. Imagination is sensuous and instinctive. Both have form, but the form of Fantasy is analogous to Exposition, that of Imagination to Narrative."

"Freud has shown one thing very clearly: that we only forget our infancy by burying it in the unconscious; and that the problems of this difficult period find their solution under a disguised form in adult life."

"Gauguin too has his limitations. We have only to compare him with a universal artist like Rembrandt to see how limited was the range of his intelligence. Gauguin was capable of creating universal symbols, but selectively, discreetly. Rembrandt was himself a universal spirit, and this spirit informs everything that he painted, so that a biblical legend, a carcass of an ox, a naked woman, his own self-portrait--all stand as symbols of an all-embracing sympathy. Perhaps only Shakespeare, in another art, has that kind of universal intelligence. But Gauguin, on his more limited frontage, reaches the same heights."

"I am not going to claim that modern anarchism has any direct relation to Roman jurisprudence; but I do claim that it has its basis in the laws of nature rather than in the state of nature."

"I can imagine no society which does not embody some method of arbitration."

"I call religion a natural authority, but it has usually been conceived as a supernatural authority."

"I have not the slightest doubt that this form of individuation represents a higher stage in the evolution of mankind."

"If modern art has produced symbols that are unfamiliar, that was only to be expected."

"I know of no better name than Anarchism."

"In a sense, every tool is a machine--the hammer, the ax, and the chisel. And every machine is a tool. The real distinction is between one man using a tool with his hands and producing an object that shows at every stage the direction of his will and the impression of his personality; and a machine which is producing, without the intervention of a particular man, objects of a uniformity and precision that show no individual variation and have no personal charm. The problem is to decide whether the objects of machine production can possess the essential qualities of art."

"If the individual is a unit in a corporate mass, his life is not merely brutish and short, but dull and mechanical."

"In general, modern art... has been inspired by a natural desire to chart the uncharted."

"If we persist in our restless desire to know everything about the universe and ourselves, then we must not be afraid of what the artist brings back from his voyage of discovery."

"It is already clear, after twenty years of socialism in Russia, that if you do not provide your society with a new religion, it will gradually revert to the old one."

"It was Nietzsche who first made us conscious of the significance of the individual as a term in the evolutionary process-in that part of the evolutionary process which has still to take place."

"Man is everywhere still in chains."

"My own early experiences in war led me to suspect the value of discipline, even in that sphere where it is so often regarded as the first essential for success."

"Nobody seriously believes in the social philosophies of the immediate past."

"Intellect begins with the observation of nature, proceeds to memorize and classify the facts thus observed, and by logical deduction builds up that edifice of knowledge properly called science… But admittedly we also know by feeling, and we can combine the two faculties, and present knowledge in the guise of art."

"It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved."

"In the evolution of mankind there has always been a certain degree of social coherence."

"In History, stagnant waters, whether they be stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals. In homage to that life and vitality, the community has to brave certain perils and must countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all."

"Poetry is creative expression; poetry is constructive expression. That, in a sentence, is the real distinction.... In poetry the words are born or re-born in the act of thinking. The words are, in Bergsonian phraseology, a becoming; they develop in the mind pari passu with the development of the thought. There is no time interval between the words and the thought. The thought is the word and the word is the thought, and both the thought and the word are Poetry. "Constructive" implies ready-made materials; words stacked round the builder, ready for use. Prose is a structure of ready-made words. Its "creative" function is confined to plan and elevation--functions these, too, of Poetry, but in Poetry subsidiary to the creative function."

"Morality, as has often been pointed out, is antecedent to religion-it even exists in a rudimentary form among animals."

"Sensibility... is a direct and particular reaction to the separate and individual nature of things. It begins and ends with the sensuous apprehension of colour, texture and formal relations; and if we strive to organize these elements, it is not with the idea of increasing the knowledge of the mind, but rather in order to intensify the pleasure of the senses."

"Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society."

"Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence."

"Simile and Metaphor differ only in degree of stylistic refinement. The Simile, in which a comparison is made directly between two objects, belongs to an earlier stage of literary expression; it is the deliberate elaboration of a correspondence, often pursued for its own sake. But a Metaphor is the swift illumination of an equivalence. Two images, or an idea and an image, stand equal and opposite; clash together and respond significantly, surprising the reader with a sudden light."

"Spontaneity is not enough – or, to be more exact, spontaneity is not possible until there is an unconscious coordination of form, space and vision."

"The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair."

"The assumption is that the right kind of society is an organic being not merely analogous to an organic being, but actually a living structure with appetites and digestions, instincts and passions, intelligence and reason."

"That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision."

"The point I am making is that in the more primitive forms of society the individual is merely a unit; in more developed forms of society he is an independent personality."

"The principle of equity first came into evidence in Roman jurisprudence and was derived by analogy from the physical meaning of the word."

"The classicist, and the naturalist who has much in common with him, refuse to see in the highest works of art anything but the exercise of judgment, sensibility, and skill. The romanticist cannot be satisfied with such a normal standard; for him art is essentially irrational – an experience beyond normality, sometimes destructive of normality, and at the very least evocative of that state of wonder which is the state of mind induced by the immediately inexplicable."

"The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group."

"The depths modern art has been exploring are mysterious depths, full of strange fish..."

"The peculiarity of sculpture is that it creates a three-dimensional object in space. Painting may strive to give on a two-dimensional plane, the illusion of space, but it is space itself as a perceived quantity that becomes the peculiar concern of the sculptor. We may say that for the painter space is a luxury; for the sculptor it is a necessity."

"The most general law in nature is equity-the principle of balance and symmetry which guides the growth of forms along the lines of the greatest structural efficiency."

"The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact."

"The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol."

"The only sin is ugliness, and if we believed this with all our being, all other activities of the human spirit could be left to take care of themselves."