Topic: Art

Quotes

Charles Murray, Human Accomplishment (2003)

• Even more startling are the words of Plutarch about Phidias, whose artistic works were regarded by the ancients with the awe that we accord Michelangelo’s: “No gifted young man upon seeing the Zeus of Phidias at Olympia ever wanted to be Phidias. For it does not necessarily follow that, if a work is delightful because of its gracefulness, the man who made it is worthy of our serious regard.” That the Romans could so reverently admire a work of art and so scorn the person who created it is perhaps part of the reason that the Romans left us so little of their own creation in the arts and sciences.#

Abraham Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism (1898)

• For even as science has to ascend from the phenomena to the investigation of their inherent order, . . . so also it is the vocation of art, not merely to observe everything visible and audible, to apprehend it, and reproduce it artistically, but much more to discover in those natural forms the order of the beautiful, and, enriched by this higher knowledge, to produce a beautiful world that transcends the beautiful of nature.#

Adam Smith, Lectures on Jurisprudence (1763)

• Love which was formerly a ridiculous passion became more grave and respectable. As a proof of this it is worth our observation that no ancient tragedy turned on love, whereas now it is more respectable and influences all the public entertainments.#

Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1907)

• Artistic realism makes the same mistake as scientific realism by assuming that it can dispense with an a priori, with a form that—springing from the inclinations and needs of our nature—provides a robe or a metamorphosis for the world of our senses. This transformation that reality suffers on its way to our consciousness is certainly a barrier between us and its immediate existence, but is at the same time the precondition for our perception and representation of it.#