See yonder thin column of smoke curling up through the woods from some invisible farmhouse, the standard raised over some rural ho...mestead.... It is a hieroglyphic of man's life, and suggests more intimate and important things than the boiling of a pot. Where its fine column rises above the forest, like an ensign, some human life has planted itself,--and such is the beginning of Rome, the establishment of the arts, and the foundation of empires, whether on the prairies of America or the steppes of Asia.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is no kind of false Wit which has been so recommended by the Practice of all Ages, as that which consists in a Jingle of Wor...ds, and is comprehended under the general Name of Punning. It is indeed impossible to kill a Weed, which the Soil has a natural Disposition to produce. The seeds of Punning are in the Minds of all Men, and tho' they may be subdued by Reason, Reflection, and good Sense, they will be very apt to shoot up in the greatest Genius, that is not broken and cultivated by the Rules of Art. Imitation is natural to us, and when it does not raise the Mind to Poetry, Painting, Musick, or other more noble Arts, it often breaks out in Punns and Quibbles.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No sooner does a great man depart, and leave his character as public property, than a crowd of little men rushes towards it. There... they are gathered together, blinking up to it with such vision as they have, scanning it from afar, hovering round it this way and that, each cunningly endeavouring, by all arts, to catch some reflex of it in the little mirror of himself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Experiments in the visual arts (the invention of new ways of seeing things), are made because, due to the way the apparatus that m...akes up the mind is made, old processes and patterns have continually to be broken up in order to make it possible to perceive the new aspects and arrangements of evolving consciousness. The great enemy of intelligence is complacency.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... there is a lightness about the feminine mind--a touch and go--music, the fine arts, that kind of thing--they should study thos...e up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He ...is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as in body garments. Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Painting is the most beautiful of all arts. In it, all sensations are condensed; contemplating it, everyone can create a story at ...the will of his imagination and--with a single glance--have his soul invaded by the most profound recollections; no effort of memory, everything is summed up in one instant. A complete art which sums up all the others and completes them. Like music, it acts on the soul through the intermediary of the senses: harmonious colors correspond to the harmonies of sound. But in painting a unity is obtained which is not possible in music, where the accords follow one another, so that the judgment experiences a continuous fatigue if it wants to reunite the end with the beginning. The ear is actually a sense inferior to the eye. The hearing can only grasp a single sound at a time, whereas the sight takes in everything and simultaneously simplifies it at will.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Architecture is a chained and fettered art. Far from being "frozen music," it is an art constantly attempting to realize in solid,... stable form those effects which music is able to conjure up in an instant--effects which succeed each other rapidly during the progress of a musical work. Music can attain the colossal in a way which, in architecture, only the rarest opportunities render even remotely possible. Music can, in a few moments, admit us through vast portals into avenues, courts and halls of infinite extent and variety. Music can suddenly raise up an entire structure and, by the device of modulation, lift it on to a podium, abruptly recess its facades and turn them bodily into the sunshine. Music can etch silhouettes ten times more intricate than those of Dresden or London City, repeat them, increase or reduce them, hurl them into the distance or bring them before us in precise detail. Most of the essentials of architecture--mass, rhythm, texture, outline--are within music's power. Almost, the two arts are the same art, the one able to express nearly everything which the imagination is capable of conceiving, the other bound by the rigours of economy and use.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I think that our villages will bear to be contrasted only with one another, not with nature. I have no great respect for the write...r's taste, who talks easily about beautiful villages, embellished, perchance, with a "fulling-mill," "a handsome academy," or a meeting-house, and "a number of shops for the different mechanic arts"; where the green and white houses of the gentry, drawn up in rows, front on a street of which it would be difficult to tell whether it is most like a desert or a long stable-yard. Such spots can be beautiful only to the weary traveler, or the returning native,--or, perchance, the repentant misanthrope; not to him who, with unprejudiced senses, has just come out of the woods, and approaches one of them, by a bare road, through a succession of straggling homesteads where he cannot tell which is the almshouse.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The animal merely makes a bed, which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some ...air in a spacious apartment, and warms that.... Thus he goes a step or two beyond instinct, and saves a little time for the fine arts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »