Quotes & Sayings About Art Aristotle

If then, as we say, good craftsmen look to the mean as they work, and if virtue, like nature, is more accurate and better than any form of art, it will follow that virtue has the quality of hitting the mean. I refer to moral virtue [not intellectual], for this is concerned with emotions and actions, in which one can have excess or deficiency or a due mean. — Aristotle.

She wanted to say, I am made of smoke. My mind is smoke, my thoughts are smoke, I am all smoke and only smoke. This body is a garment I put on, which by my magic art I have made capable of functioning as a human body functions, it's so biologically perfect that it can conceive children and pop them out in threes, fours and fives. Yet I am not of this body and could, if I chose, inhabit another woman, or an antelope, or a gnat. Aristotle was wrong, for I have lived for aeons, and altered by body when I chose, like a garment of which I had grown tired. The mind and the body are two, she wanted to say, but she knew it would disappoint him to be disagreed with, so she held her tongue. — Salman Rushdie

modern humanist education believes in teaching students to think for themselves. It is good to know what Aristotle, Solomon and Aquinas thought about politics, art and economics; yet since the supreme source of meaning and authority lies within ourselves, it is far more important to know what you think about these matters. — Yuval Noah Harari

In part, art completes what nature cannot elaborate; and in part it imitates nature. — Aristotle.

Art is a higher type of knowledge than experience. — Aristotle.

Of course I want you," he said roughly. "Every thought in my head is of you. Tasting you, touching you, taking you in ways your innocent mind can't even fathom. I don't know a cursed thing about art or music or Aristotle. My every though is crude and base and so far beneath you, it might as well be on the opposite side of the earth. — Tessa Dare

Why is it that all those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, or the arts are clearly of an atrabilious temperament and some of them to such an extent as to be affected by diseases caused by black bile? — Aristotle.

With respect to the requirement of art, the probable impossible is always preferable to the improbable possible. — Aristotle.

Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic? — Aristotle.

The science of the church is neglected for the study of geometry, and they lose sight of Heaven while they are employed in measuring the earth. Euclid is perpetually in their hands. Aristotle and Theophrastus are the objects of their admiration; and they express an uncommon reverence for the works of Galen. Their errors are derived from the abuse of the arts and sciences of the infidels, and they corrupt the simplicity of the gospel by the refinements of human reason. — Edward Gibbon

Hippodamus, son of Euryphon, a native of Miletus, invented the art of planning and laid out the street plan of Piraeus. — Aristotle.

Thus, since time immemorial, it has been customary to accept the criticism of art from a man who may or may not have been artist himself. Some believe that artist should create its art and leave it for critic to pass judgement over it. Whereas dramatists like Ben Jonson is of the view that to 'judge of poets is only the faculty of poets; and not of all poets, but the best'. Only the best of poets have the right to pass judgments on the merit or defects of poetry, for they alone have experienced the creative process form beginning to end, and they alone can rightly understand it. — Aristotle.

Aristotle is the last Greek philosopher who faces the world cheerfully; after him, all have, in one form or another, a philosophy of retreat. The world is bad; let us learn to be independent of it. External goods are precarious; they are the gift of fortune, not the reward of our own efforts. Only subjective goods - virtue, or contentment through resignation - are secure, and these alone, therefore, will be valued by the wise man. Diogenes personally was a man full of vigour, but his doctrine, like all those of the Hellenistic age, was one to appeal to weary men, in whom disappointment had destroyed natural zest. And it was certainly not a doctrine calculated to promote art or science or statesmanship, or any useful activity except one of protest against powerful evil. — Anonymous

As a rule, we don't like to feel to sad or lonely or depressed. So why do we like music (or books or movies) that evoke in us those same negative emotions? Why do we choose to experience in art the very feelings we avoid in real life?
Aristotle deals with a similar question in his analysis of tragedy. Tragedy, after all, is pretty gruesome. [ ... ] There's Sophocles's Oedipus, who blinds himself after learning that he has killed his father and slept with his mother. Why would anyone watch this stuff? Wouldn't it be sick to enjoy watching it? [ ... ] Tragedy's pleasure doesn't make us feel "good" in any straightforward sense. On the contrary, Aristotle says, the real goal of tragedy is to evoke pity and fear in the audience. Now, to speak of the pleasure of pity and fear is almost oxymoronic. But the point of bringing about these emotions is to achieve catharsis of them - a cleansing, a purification, a purging, or release. Catharsis is at the core of tragedy's appeal. — Brandon W. Forbes

And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war. — Aristotle.

Art takes nature as its model. — Aristotle.

Again, it is harder to fight with pleasure than with anger, to use Heraclitus' phrase', but both art and virtue are always concerned with what is harder; — Aristotle.

Nevertheless, some men turn every quality or art into a means of making money; this they conceive to be the end, and to the promotion of the end all things must contribute. — Aristotle.

Helen's era was quite different from what most people think of when they hear the words ancient Greece. The Parthenon, the graceful statues, the works of Sophocles, Euripides, Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato, all came nearly a thousand years after Helen's time, during the classical era. In the Bronze Age, no one yet knew how to make brittle iron flexible enough to use for tools and weapons. Art, especially sculpture of the human form, was stiffer and more stylized. Few people could read or write. Instead of signing important papers, you would use a stone seal to leave an impression on clay tablets. The design on the seal would be as unique as a signature. There was a kind of writing in Bronze Age Greece, but it was mostly used to keep track of financial matters, such as royal tax records. Messages, poems, songs, and stories were not written down but were memorized and passed along by word of mouth. — Esther M. Friesner

In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure. — Aristotle.

For the Chinese, the Greeks, the Mayans, or the Egyptians, nature was a living totality, a creative being. For this reason, art, according to Aristotle, is imitation; the poet imitates the creative gesture of nature. — Octavio Paz

All art, all education, can be merely a supplement to nature. — Aristotle.

At the dressing table, every woman has a chance to be an artist, and art, as Aristotle said, completes what nature left unfinished. — Sophia Loren

There is more both of beauty and of raison d'etre in the works of nature- than in those of art. — Aristotle.

The 'Renaissance' West Butchered the Rest.
If I had to choose between an erudite Aristotle and an unknown 'soulless' black slave I would choose the latter. The ascendancy of the West was on a heap of bodies of slaves and trampled humanity through colonization — Viktor Vijay Kumar

It [Romanticism] is concerned - in the words of Aristotle - not with things as they are, but with things as they might be and ought to be. — Ayn Rand

Excellence is not an art. It is the habit of practice. — Aristotle.

Should a man live underground, and there converse with the works of art and mechanism, and should afterwards be brought up into the open day, and see the several glories of the heaven and earth, he would immediately pronounce them the work of such a Being as we define God to be. — Aristotle.

The production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet. — Aristotle.

If purpose, then, is inherent in art, so is it in Nature also. The best illustration is the case of a man being his own physician, for Nature is like that - agent and patient at once. — Aristotle.

The virtue as the art consecrates itself constantly to what's difficult to do, and the harder the task, the shinier the success. — Aristotle.

The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents the true reality, not external aspects. — Aristotle.

Aristotle was the first accurate critic and truest judge nay, the greatest philosopher the world ever had; for he noted the vices of all knowledges, in all creatures, and out of many men's perfections in a science he formed still one Art. — Ben Jonson

My friend asked me if it had been cathartic, to write my memoir. I looked down at the sculptures - it was cathartic for me to look at them, but I could imagine it might have been hell to make them (I was cheered / when I came first to know / that there were flowers also / in hell). No, I answered - how was it for you to read it? Aristotle, in his Poetics, never promised catharsis for the makers of art, only for the audience. — Nick Flynn

Comedy aims at representing men as worse, Tragedy as better than in actual life. — Aristotle.

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well. — Aristotle.

Every art, and every science reduced to a teachable form, and in like manner every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good: for which reason a common and by no means a bad description of the Chief Good is, that which all things aim at. — Aristotle.

Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia. — Aristotle.

The same thing may have all the kinds of causes, e.g. the moving cause of a house is the art or the builder, the final cause is the function it fulfils, the matter is earth and stones, and the form is the definitory formula. — Aristotle.

If the art of ship-building were in the wood, ships would exist by nature. — Aristotle.

Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art. — Aristotle.

The peculiar circumstances arising out of the fall of the Syracusan tyranny seem to have produced the first practitioners of the art of rhetorical — Aristotle.

Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation. — Immanuel Kant

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. — Aristotle.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. — Aristotle.

Aristotle says in the book of secrets that communicating too many arcana of nature and art breaks a celestial seal and many evils can ensue. Which does not mean that secrets must not be revealed, but that the learned must decide when and how. — Umberto Eco

Art is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning. — Aristotle.

The art of wealth-getting which consists in household management, on the one hand, has a limit; the unlimited acquisition of wealth is not its business. And therefore, in one point of view, all riches must have a limit; nevertheless, as a matter of fact, we find the opposite to be the case; for all getters of wealth increase their hard coin without limit. — Aristotle.

All art is concerned with coming into being; for it is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature. — Aristotle.

It gives him spiritual freedom. To him life is a tragedy and by his gift of creation he enjoys the catharsis a purging of pity and terror, Which Aristotle tells is the object of art.
Everything is transformed by his power into material and by writing it he can overcome it. Everything is grist to his mill.
... The artist is the only free man. — W. Somerset Maugham

All who have meditated upon the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depend upon the education of youth. — Aristotle.

The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself. — Aristotle.

Art completes what nature cannot bring to finish. The artist gives us knowledge of nature's unrealized ends. — Aristotle.

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth. — Aristotle.

The noble things and the just things, which the political art examines, admit of much dispute and variability, such that they are held to exist by law11 alone and not by nature. — Aristotle.

The deficiencies of nature are what art and education seek to fill up. — Aristotle.

At first he who invented any art that went beyond the common perceptions of man was naturally admired by men, not only because there was something useful in the inventions, but because he was thought wise and superior to the rest. But as more arts were invented, and some were directed to the necessities of life, others to its recreation, the inventors of the latter were always regarded as wiser than the inventors of the former, because their branches of knowledge did not aim at utility. — Aristotle.

Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle taught us that money should be durable, divisible, consistent, convenient, and value in itself. It should be durable, which is why wheat isn't money; divisible which is why works of art are not money; consistent which is why real estate isn't money; convenient, which is why lead isn't money; value in itself, which is why paper shouldn't be money. Gold answers to all these criteria. — Doug Casey

If there is an art of living, it is not something that can be taught timelessly. We have lessons to learn from Aristotle et al, for sure, but not if we simply uproot them from their epoch and stamp them into 21st-century soil. — Julian Baggini

We learn an art or craft by doing the things that we shall have to do when we have learnt it. — Aristotle.

Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies. — Aristotle.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully. — Aristotle.

A good style must have an air of novelty, at the same time concealing its art. — Aristotle.

Means of succeeding in the object we set before us. We must make as it were a fresh start, and before going further define what rhetoric is. Rhetoric may be defined as the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion. This is not a function of any other art. Every other art can instruct or persuade about its own particular subject-matter; for instance, medicine about what is healthy and unhealthy, geometry about the properties of magnitudes, arithmetic about numbers, and the same is true of the other arts and sciences. But rhetoric we look upon as the power of observing the means of persuasion on almost any subject presented to us; — Aristotle.

Most men appear to think that the art of despotic government is statesmanship, and what men affirm to be unjust and inexpedient in their own case they are not ashamed of practicing towards others; they demand just rule for themselves, but where other men are concerned they care nothing about it. Such behavior is irrational; unless the one party is, and the other is not, born to serve, in which case men have a right to command, not indeed all their fellows, but only those who are intended to be subjects; just as we ought not to hunt mankind, whether for food or sacrifice . — Aristotle.

Homer begged and Rembrandt went bankrupt. Aristotle, who had money for books, his school, and his museum, could not have bought this painting of himself.
Rembrandt could not afford a Rembrandt. — Joseph Heller