Quotes & Sayings About Egyptian Art

You don't need to be too anxious about anything; you only need to get understanding! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Only if your God can say things that upset you will you know you have a real God and not just a creation of your imagination. So — Timothy J. Keller

Itjtawy was ancient Egypt's capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom about four thousand years ago. The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt, and the site is really important because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion. — Sarah Parcak

At the Egyptian city of Naucratis there was a famous old god whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis was sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. — Plato

The end of Egypt's isolation turned what had been only occasional and incidental contact with the rest of the Near East into a constant and significant exchange of goods and ideas. The new cosmopolitanism introduced new forms and motifs and a growing naturalism to art. Egypt had always been receptive to immigrants, who had easily been assimilated into its culture; now even the pharaohs could marry foreigners. In addition, the increase of commerce and the emergence of a cosmopolitan urban population
at Thebes and other cities
marked the first real urbanization in Egyptian society. — Norman F. Cantor

the time is always right to do what is
R I G H T — Nobody!

The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years. — Jerry Saltz

Greeks and Romans were anti-Mediterranean cultures, in the sense of being at odds with much of the political heritages of Persia, Egypt, and Phoenicia. While Hellenism was influenced - and enriched - at times by Near Eastern, Egyptian, and Persian art, literature, religion, and architecture, its faith in consensual government and free markets was unique. Greek and Latin words for "democracy," "republic," "city-state," "constitution," "freedom," "liberty," and "free speech" have no philological equivalents in other ancient languages of the Mediterranean (and few in the contemporary languages of the non-West as well). — Victor Davis Hanson

As I explain at some length in 'The Crystal Sun' this particular angle, which we can call the 'golden angle,' is the precise value of the acute angle of of a right-angled 'golden triangle' that embodies the golden mean proportion ....

The Danish art historian Else Kielland established with conclusive and absolutely overwhelming evidence and analysis that this angle was the basis for all Egyptian art and architecture. She did this in her monumental work 'Geometry in Egyptian Art' .....

The King's Chamber inside the Great Pyramid embodies no fewer than eight occurrences of the golden angle, and the coffer in the chamber embodies yet more. — Robert K. G. Temple

Civilisation once looked to art as the means of passing wisdom from one generation to the next. Writing itself was invented in part to convey the sacred: permanent things deserved a permanent place, hence the hieroglyphs on Egyptian tombs. But a modern civilisation that no longer believes in permanent things, one that accepts no certain narrative of meaning, — Philip Yancey

No matter what happens, as long as you think positively, hopelessness can never touch you! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

I would like my work to be recognized as being in the classical tradition (Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese), as representing the Ideal in the mind. Classical art cannot possibly be eclectic. One must see the ideal in one's own mind. It is like a memory - an awareness -of perfection. — Agnes Martin

For the great eras in the history of the development of all the arts have been eras not of increased feeling or enthusiasm in feeling for art, but of new technical improvements primarily and specially. The discovery of marble quarries in the purple ravines of Pentelicus and on the little low-lying hills of the island of Paros gave to the Greeks the opportunity for that intensified vitality of action, that more sensuous and simple humanism, to which the Egyptian sculptor working laboriously in the hard porphyry and rose-coloured granite of the desert could not attain. The splendour of the Venetian school began with the introduction of the new oil medium for painting. The progress in modern music has been due to the invention of new instruments entirely, and in no way to an increased consciousness on the part of the musician of any wider social aim. — Oscar Wilde

The problem with digital architecture is that an algorithm can produce endless variations, so an architect has many choices. — Peter Eisenman

The central concern of Egyptian art, literature, and architecture was the divine world order
the pharaoh and the gods, who were essentially one and the same. To the Egyptians, that divine order was eternal and unchanging, but it did not rest on a coherent and defined system of belief. The same god might be seen one time as the sky, another time as a bird; he might have a mythical mother, yet it might be said that he gave birth to himself; the sky could be both a cow and a goddess. The Egyptians did not think in chronological or logical terms but pictured the same phenomenon in a number of different ways. — Norman F. Cantor

As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs. I might possibly invent some excuse for them and him, but I have no time for it. As for the religion and love of art of the builders, it is much the same the world over, whether the building be an Egyptian temple or the United States Bank. It costs more than it comes to ... For my part, I should like to know who in those days did not build them
who were above such trifling. — Henry David Thoreau

Follow your heart as long as you live ... Bring your whole heart towards excellence ... And no limit may be set to art. — The Instruction Of Ptahhotop

I think the aloe is one of South Africa's most powerful, beautiful and celebratory symbols. It survives out there in the wild when everything else is dried. — Athol Fugard

You don't need to be rich to have high confidence, all you do need is to be proud of yourself and there you'll go with confidence. — Auliq Ice

It is a question in that case of breaking up one piece of art, and whether that piece of art can be as best as possible put back together. So it's an argument to say, maybe that's one of those instances, like the bust of Nefertiti, I think that should be given back [Egyptian piece currently in Neues Museum in Berlin]. It's one of those pieces you look at and think that would probably be the right thing to do. — George Clooney

The feat of superbly imitating a muscle, as Michelangelo did, or a face, as Raphael did, created neither progress nor a hierarchy in art. Because these artists of the sixteenth century imitated human forms, they were not superior to the artists of the high periods of Egyptian, Chaldean, Indochinese, Roman, and Gothic art who interpreted and stylized form but did not imitate it. — Fernand Leger

Be strong! We are not here to play, to dream, to drift; We have hard work to do and loads to lift; Shun not the struggle-face it; 'tis God's gift. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

To attempt to build up theories of art, or to form a new style, would be an act of supreme folly. It would be at once to reject the experiences and accumulated knowledge of thousands of years. On the contrary, we should regard as our inheritance all the successful labours of the past, not blindly following them, but employ simply as guides to find the true path. — Owen Jones Classics

An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle In The Shape Of A Fish
Here we have thirst
and patience, from the first,
and art, as in a wave held up for us to see
in its essential perpendicularity;
Not brittle but
intense
the spectrum, that
spectacular and humble animal the fish,
whose scales turn aside the sun's sword with their polish. — Marianne Moore

There was a single window that tapered into a funnel, with eerie moonlight passing through it, reflecting directly off the globe like a mirror. For a moment, as I rose I saw something glimmering within. Dumbly, with feverish whispers assailing me, I realized it was the center of one of the distant galaxies, flaring after some unknown cataclysm. Its radiance was such that it burst from its prison. It met the moonlight halfway. It created kaleidoscopic colours on the walls. Then, in answer, the reliefs transformed from majestic art into something approaching divine, alive, plays from Egyptian memory, given the spark of life from space. I saw animal-headed gods move. They stepped from the walls to take their place around the altar. All stared at the globe. Each raised their arms in silent supplication. And such was their toxic ecstasy that I wished to join them, to forget my dreadful experiences and revel in something truly wondrous. — Tim Reed

Rumors and reports of man's relation with animals are the world's oldest news stories, headlined in the stars of the zodiac, posted on the walls of prehistoric caves, inscribed in the languages of Egyptian myth, Greek philosophy, Hindu religion, Christian art, our own DNA. Belonging within the circle of mankind's intimate acquaintance ... constant albeit speechless companions, they supplied energies fit to be harnessed or roasted. — Lewis H. Lapham

Could we bring ourselves to feel what the first spectators of an Egyptian statue, or a Romanesque crucifixion, felt, we would make haste to remove them from the Louvre. True, we are trying more and more to gauge the feelings of those first spectators, but without forgetting our own, and we can be contented all the more easily with the mere knowledge of the former, without experiencing them, because all we wish to do is put this knowledge to the work of art. — Andre Malraux

Via the mediation of the Enlightenment, this movement had changed from a hobby among a tiny literate elite and their secretaries, an ostentatious amusement among princely and mercantile art patrons and their masterly suppliers (who established a first 'art system'), into a national, a European, indeed a planetary matter. In order to spread from the few to the many, the renaissance had to discard its humanistic exterior and reveal itself as the return of ancient mass culture. The true renaissance question, reformulated in the terminology of practical philosophy - namely, whether other forms of life are possible and permissible for us alongside and after Christianity, especially ones whose patterns are derived from Greek and Roman (perhaps even Egyptian or Indian) antiquity - was no longer a secret discourse or an academic exercise in the nineteenth century, but rather an epochal passion, an inescapable pro nobis. — Peter Sloterdijk

Come athwart my hawse and I shall ride you down, you half-baked son of an Egyptian fart,' to a wool-gathering jolly-boat; and art echoed from either shore. — Patrick O'Brian