One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.

The great moral teachers of humanity were, in a way, artistic geniuses in the art of living.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man.

We, by our arts may be called the grandsons of God.

What is fair in men, passes away, but not so in art.

Art is a lie that leads us to the truth.

Politics is the art of the possible. Remark, Aug. 11, 1867.

There are few enough people with sufficient independence to see the weaknesses and follies of their contemporaries and remain themselves untouched by them. And these isolated few usually soon lose their zeal for putting things to rights when they have come face to face with human obduracy. Only to a tiny minority is it given to fascinate their generation by subtle humour and grace and to hold the mirror up to it by the impersonal agency of art. To-day I salute with sincere emotion the supreme master of this method, who has delighted — and educated — us all. Greeting to G. Bernard Shaw.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse. From a speech given at the Royal Academy of Art in 1953.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage— and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still— I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art.

Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

Art is not made to decorate rooms. It is an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.

All art is but imitation of nature.

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. 27 September 1976

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

How often people speak of art and science as though they were two entirely different things, with no interconnection. An artist is emotional, they think, and uses only his intuition; he sees all at once and has no need of reason. A scientist is cold, they think, and uses only his reason; he argues carefully step by step, and needs no imagination. That is all wrong. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers. The true scientist is quite imaginative as well as rational, and sometimes leaps to solutions where reason can follow only slowly; if he does not, his science suffers.

A picture or representation of human figures, ought to be done in such a way as that the spectator may easily recognise, by means of their attitudes, the purpose in their minds.

Politics is not an exact science... but an art. Speech (15 March 1884)

Music is the most physically inspiring of all the Arts. From a keynote address to the American Society of University Composers

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.