Lewis Mumford Quotes

The fundamental purpose of the artist is the same as that of a scientist: to state a fact.

Indeed, I would feel that an appreciation of the arts in a conscious, disciplined way might help one to do science better.

When people ask me what it is about Brazil and my work, it's not something that I can say literally. It's unidentifiable. It's like when you do research and things inspire you. If you're smart enough, then obviously you don't take it literally. The inspiration will come out later somehow.

People assume that science is a very cold sort of profession, whereas writing novels is a warm and fuzzy intuitive thing. But in fact, they are not at all different.

The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does.

Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.

Musicians are also interpretive artists and we are just as creative as painters and writers. We interpret in a way that expresses ourselves.

As an artist, you've got to see the mess. That's what we do. We get a human being, and it's like putting together a puzzle. And the puzzle has got to be a mixture, a multifaceted mixture of human emotions, and not all of it is going to be pretty.

Traditionally, photography has dealt with recording the world as it is found. Before photography appeared the fine artists of the time, the painters and sculptors, concerned themselves with rendering reality with as much likeness as their skill enabled. Photography, however, made artistic reality much more available, more quickly and on a much broader scale.

I've always felt the portrait is an occasion for marks to happen. I've never viewed the portrait as about the sitter. Even when I go to the National Portrait Gallery, I'm not thinking about the sitter; I'm thinking about how the artist chose that color or that highlight. It becomes about the time, place, and context.

All the things an artist must be: poet, explorer of nature, philosopher!

I haven't the slightest idea what art is, but to be a painter is something of which you have to prove.

An artist’s job is to captivate… if we stumble into truth, we got lucky.

This is what the painter, the poet, the speculative philosopher, and the natural scientists do, each in his own fashion.

The artist is called a creator.

Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts - only in the truth.

In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.

To create is to relate. We trust in the artist in everybody to make his own connections, his own juxtapositions.

The artist's job? To be a miracle worker: make the blind see, the dull feel, the dead to live.

Isn’t every human being both a scientist and an artist; and in writing of human experience, isn’t there a good deal to be said for recognizing that fact and for using both methods?

An artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way

The artist is not the transcriber of the world, he is its rival.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience.

The frame is the reward of the artist.

Artists should never look at pictures, but should stutter in a language of their own.