William Whewell Quotes

Art always serves beauty, and beauty is the joy of possessing form, and form is the key to organic life since no living thing can exist without it.

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

Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.

Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.

Science disembodies; art embodies.

In art, truth is a means to an end; in science, it is the only end.

Art is the employent of the powers of nature for an end.

They are works of art that can be considered works of art but don't have to be in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.

Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.

Science is only a Latin word for knowledge

What art should be about,' they will say, 'is revealing exquisite and resonant truths about the human condition.' Well, to be honest - no, it shouldn’t. I mean, it can occasionally, if it wants to; but really, how many penetrating insights to human nature do you need in one lifetime? Two? Three? Once you’ve realised that no one else has a clue what they’re doing, either, and that love can be totally pointless, any further insights into human nature just start getting depressing really.

Both art and science are bent on the understanding of the forces that shape existence, and both call for a dedication to what is. Neither of them can tolerate capricious subjectivity because both are subject to their criteria of truth. Both require precision, order, and discipline because no comprehensible statement can be made without these. Both accept the sensory world as what the Middle Ages called signatura regrum, the signature of things, but in quite different ways.

If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

For me science is not different from art, except in the one small, crucial detail that experiments speak their own truths, not ours.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means.

By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which is ugly, and it is only the ugly that is universal.

The ordinary true, or purely real, cannot be the object of the arts. Illusion on a ground of truth,--that is the secret of the fine arts.

Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else.

One of the reasons I've gotten so attached to talking to scientists is that... they know there is a reality.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

The man of science is a poor philosopher.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

Science is not addressed to poets.