Great Throughts Treasury

"Government... is neither business, nor technology, nor applied science. It is the art of making men live together in peace and with reasonable happiness." - Felix Frankfurter

"Employ thy time well if thou meanest to gain leisure; and since thou art not sure of a minute, throw not away an hour. Leisure is time for doing something useful, and this leisure the diligent man will obtain, but the lazy man never, for a life of leisure and a life of laziness are two things." - Benjamin Franklin

"There is a means of return from fantasy to reality, and that is art." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"Art is significant deformity." - Roger Fry, fully Roger Eliot Fry

"Art is either plagiarism or revolution." -

"Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Beauty is at once the ultimate principle and the highest aim of art." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Science and art belong to the whole world, and before then vanish the barriers of nationality." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Tell me with whom thou art found, and I will tell thee who thou art." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The connoisseur of art must be able to appreciate what is simply beautiful, but the common run of people are satisfied with ornament." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"There are three classes of readers; some enjoy without judgment; others judge without enjoyment; and some there are who judge while they enjoy and enjoy while they judge. The latter class reproduces the work of art on which it is engaged. Its numbers are very small." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"There is no surer method of evading the world than by following art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by art." - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Somewhere among the youth of today are minds capable of discovering ways to world peace, ways to deeper and more fulfilling lives, ways to new appreciations of beauty in art or literature or music, just as there have been minds capable of splitting the atom. Ours is the task of breaking through the thought barrier which keeps our young people from realizing their creative potentiality." - Samuel B. Gould

"This art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of energy in our great men." - James Hadfield, fully Captain James Arthur Hadfield

"A single mind can acquire a fair knowledge of the whole field of science, and find plenty of time to spare for ordinary human affairs. Not many people take the trouble to do so. But without a knowledge of science one cannot understand current events. That is why our modern our modern literature and art are mostly so unreal." - J. B. S. Haldane, fully John Burdon Sanderson Haldane

"Of all intellectual friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old and ripe men and their younger brethren in science or literature or art. It is by; these private friendships, even more than by public performance, that the tradition of sound thinking and great doing is perpetuated from age to age." - Philip G. Hamerton, fully Philip Gilbert Hamerton

"We live in a spelling bee culture where the demand is factual accuracy and everybody overlooks the absence of art or meaning in what's said. Too many people sent letters to Nero telling him he was fingering his fiddle wrong. This passion for data is a way of avoiding coming to terms with things." - Mark Harris

"But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat." - Molly Haskell

"[Music] It reveals us to ourselves, it represents those modulations and temperamental changes which escape all verbal analysis, it utters what must else remain forever unuttered and unutterable; it feeds that deep, ineradicable instinct within us of which all art is only the reverberated echo, that craving to express, through the medium of the senses, the spiritual and eternal realties which underlie them." - Hugh Reginald Haweis

"Art is a staple of mankind - never a by-product of elitism. So urgent, so utterly linked with the pulse of feeling that it becomes the singular sing of life when every other aspect of civilization fails... Like hunger and sex, it is a disposition of the human cell - a marvelous fiction of the brain which recreates itself as something as mysterious as mind. Art is consistent with every aspect of every day in the life of every people." - Jamake Highwater

"Many persons feel art, some understand it; but few both feel and understand it." - George Stillman Hillard

"Art needs no spur beyond itself." - Victor Hugo

"The Golden Rule exists in each of the world's major religions... Hinduism: Do naught to others which, if done to thee, would cause thee pain: this is the sum of duty. Buddhism: A clansman [should] minister to his friends and familiars... by treating them as he treats himself. Confucianism: The Master replied: "What you do not want done to yourself, do not do unto others." Taoism: To those who are good to me, I am good; and to those who are not good to me, I am also good. And thus all get to be good. To those who are sincere with me, I am sincere; and to those who are not sincere with me, I am also sincere. And thus all get to be sincere. Zorastrianism: Whatever thou dost not approve for thyself, do not approve for anyone else. When thou hast acted in this manner, thou art righteous. Judaism: Take heed to thyself, my child, in all thy works; and be discreet in all thy behavior. And what thou thyself hatest, do to no man. Christianity: All things therefore whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, even so do ye also unto them. Greek Philosophy: Do not do to others what you would not wish to suffer yourself. Treat your friends as you would want them to treat you." - Robert Ernest Hume

"Great art is an instant arrested in eternity." -

"The mission of art is to represent nature; not to imitate her." - William Morris Hunt

"Education: To be at home in all lands and ages; to count Nature as a familiar acquaintance and Art an intimate friend; to gain a standard for the appreciation of other men's work and the criticism of one's own; to carry the keys of the world's library in one's pocket, and feel its resources behind one in whatever task he undertakes; to make hosts of friends among the men of one's own age who are the leaders in all walks of life; to lose oneself in general enthusiasms and co-operate with others for common ends." - William De Witt Hyde

"In art one arrives at an honorable result only through one's tears. He who does not suffer does not believe." - Jean-Augustine-Dominique Ingres

"To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life." - William James

"In the art of design, color is to form what verse is to prose, a more harmonious and luminous vehicle of thought." - Anna Jameson

"The art of life is the art of avoiding pain." - Thomas Jefferson

"Art is the window to man’s soul. Without it, he would never be able to see his immediate world; nor could the world see the man within." - Lady Bird Johnson, fully Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Taylor Johnson

"It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy and yet unenvied, to be healthy without physic, secure without a guard, and to obtain from the bounty of nature what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of art." -

"Most arts require long study and application; but the most useful art of all, that of pleasing, requires only desire." -

"Novelty is indeed necessary to preserve eagerness and alacrity; but art and nature have sores inexhaustible by human intellects; and every moment produces something new to him who has quickened his faculties by diligent observation." -

"There is nothing too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible." -

"Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is "man" in a higher sense- he is "collective man" - one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic forms of mankind." - Carl Jung, fully Carl Gustav Jung

"A work of art is not completed on the canvas. It is completed in the mind of the man who looks at it." - Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler

"Logic is the art of thinking well: the mind, like the body, requires to be trained before it can use its power in the most advantageous way." -

"If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"In free society art is not a weapon... Artists are not engineers of the soul." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of men's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his experience. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgment. The artist... faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an offensive state." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind." - Rockwell Kent

"Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible." - Paul Klee

"Music is God’s best gift to man, the only art of heaven given to earth, the only art of earth that we take to heaven. But music, like all our gifts, is given us in the germ. It is for us to unfold and develop it by instruction and cultivation." - Charles W. Landon

"Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature." -

"Every kind of art is beautiful, as all life is beautiful, for much the same reason: that it embodies sentience, from the most elementary sense of vitality, individual being and continuity, to the full expansion of human perception, human love and hate, triumph and misery, enlightenment, wisdom." -

"What art expresses is not actual feeling, but ideas of feeling; as language does not express actual things and events but ideas of them. Art is expressive through and through - every line, every sound, every gesture; and therefore it is a hundred per cent symbolic. It is not sensuously pleasing and also symbolic; the sensuous quality is in the service of its vital import." -

"Much of what has been achieved by the art of education in the nineteenth century has been frustrated by the art of propaganda in the twentieth." -