Albert Einstein Quotes

Science provides an understanding of a universal experience. Arts provide a universal understanding of a personal experience.

No, I only like whether I like the story or not, essentially see something in it that isn't completely there.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Mathematical science shows what is. It is the language of unseen relations between things. But to use and apply that language, we must be able fully to appreciate, to feel, to seize the unseen, the unconscious.

Some people spend their time and thoughts in feeling, hearing, seeing, and listening. Whatever cannot be felt or experienced they will not accept. We call these people 'emotional.'

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience.

When you're reading something, your imagination goes and you see it in your mind. Sometimes my instincts with that are right, and sometimes they're wrong.

Through art alone are we able to emerge from ourselves, to know what another person sees of a universe which is not the same as our own and of which, without art, the landscapes would remain as unknown to us as those that may exist on the moon.

A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.

Art is an experience, not an object.

Art is not about understanding, it’s about experience.

What Artistic and Scientific Experience Have in Common - Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking, and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science. If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, we are engaged in science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively as meaninful, then we are engaged in art. Common to both is the loving devotion to that which transcends personal concerns and volition.

Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all meaning of the thing seen. Then only could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.

Observing someone without context amplifies the experience. The more we know, the less we are able to feel.

Life is consciousness.

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

There is a basin in the mind where words float around on thought and thought on sound and sight. Then there is a depth of thought untouched by words, and deeper still a gulf of formless feelings untouched by thought.

I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree.

For, to my mind, this is a certain principle, that nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world. He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. (on commenting the text of Genesis 1:6)

Since art is a virtue of the intellect, it demands to communicate with the entire universe of the intellect. Hence it is that the normal climate of art is intelligence and knowledge: its normal soil, the civilized heritage of a consistent and integrated system of beliefs and values; its normal horizon , the infinity of human experience enlighted by the passionate insight of anguish or the intellectual virtues of a contemplative mind.

Men are rather beholden ... generally to chance or anything else, than to logic, for the invention of arts and sciences.

In reality, our mind is the creator of all the things we experience.

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.