Art, it seems to me, should simplify. That, indeed, is very nearly the whole of the higher artistic process; finding what conventi...ons of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole--so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Perhaps, the highest pleasure in art is identical with the highest pleasure in scientific theory. The emotion which accompanies th...e clear recognition of unity in a complex seems so similar in art and in science that it is difficult not to suppose that they are psychologically the same. It is, as it were, the final stage of both processes. This unity-emotion in science supervenes upon a process of pure mechanical reasoning; in art it supervenes upon a process of which emotion has all along been an essential concomitant.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Thinking is seeing.... Every human science is based on deduction, which is a slow process of seeing by which we work up from the e...ffect to the cause; or, in a wider sense, all poetry like every work of art proceeds from a swift vision of things.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meani...ngs in symbolic terms, and the reordering of nature--the qualities of space and time--in new perceptual and material form. Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic. Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience within a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain. But art and technology are not separate realms walled off from each other. Art employs techne, but for its own ends. Techne, too, is a form of art that bridges culture and social structure, and in the process reshapes both.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Politics is not an end, but a means. It is not a product, but a process. It is the art of government. Like other values it has its... counterfeits. So much emphasis has been placed upon the false that the significance of the true has been obscured and politics has come to convey the meaning of crafty and cunning selfishness, instead of candid and sincere service.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Neither a work of nature nor one of art we get to know when they have been finished; we must surprise them in the process of being... created so as to understand them to some degree.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of th...e journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation.... It is t...he rarest thing to find a player who has not had his character affected for the worse by the practice of his profession. Nobody can make a habit of self-exhibition, nobody can exploit his personality for the sake of exercising a kind of hypnotic power over others, and remain untouched by the process.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Science and art are only too often a superior kind of dope, possessing this advantage over booze and morphia: that they can be ind...ulged in with a good conscience and with the conviction that, in the process of indulging, one is leading the "higher life."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance ... and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of i...ts process.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »