Ernst Cassirer Quotes

Through photography, both artist and scientist can find a common denominator in their search for the synthesis of modern vision in time, space and structure.

Art is science in the flesh.

To me the most interesting thing about man is that he is an animal who practices art and science and in every known society practices both together.

People think of art and science as being fundamentally opposed to each other, because art is about celebrating individual human creativity, and science is about discovering general principles, not about individual people. But in fact, the two have a lot in common, and the creative spirit is similar in both.

The discoveries of science, the works of art are explorations - more, are explosions, of a hidden likeness. The discoverer or artist presents in them two aspects of nature and fuses them into one. This is the act of creation, in which an original thought is born, and it is the same act in original science and original art.

I set out to show that there exists single creative activity,which is displayed alike in the arts and in the sciences.It is wrong to think of science as a mechanical record of facts, and it is wrong to think of the arts as remote and private fancies. What makes each human, what makes them universal, is the stamp of the creative mind.

The whole body of the arts and sciences composes one vast machinery for the irritation and development of the human intellect.

Einstein is notmerely an artist in his moments of leisure and play, as a great statesman may play golf or a great soldier grow orchids. He retains the same attitude in the whole of his work. He traces science to its roots in emotion, which is exactly where art is also rooted.

Science and art sometimes can touch one another, like two pieces of the jigsaw puzzle which is our human life, and that contact may be made across the boderline between the two respective domains.

There is no difference between science and art when it comes to creativeness, productiveness, to come to conclusions and to formulations.

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

Science attempts to figure out laws and then uses it later. While the work of art reflects the cosmic order without asking for an explanation

The new painters do not propose, any more than did their predecessors, to be geometers. But it may be said that geometry is to the plastic arts what grammar is to the art of the writer. Today, scholars no longer limit themselves to the three dimensions of Euclid. The painters have been lead quite naturally, one might say by intuition, to preoccupy themselves with the new possibilities of spatial measurement which, in the language of the modern studios, are designated by the term fourth dimension.

What interests me is to paint the kind of antisensitivity that impregnates modern civilization. I think art since Cezanne has become extremely romantic and unrealistic, feeding on art. It is Utopian. It has less and less to do with the world. It looks inward - neo-Zen and all that. Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn't look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

The world of sight is still limitless. It is the artist who limits vision to the cramped dimensions of his own ego.

Einstein's space is no closer to reality than Van Gogh's sky . The glory of science is not in a truth more absolute than the truth of Bach or Tolstoy, but in the act of creation itself. The scientist's discoveries impose his own order on chaos, as the composer or painter imposes his; an order that always refers to limited aspects of reality, and is based on the observer's frame of reference, which differs from period to period as a Rembrant nude differs from a nude by Manet.

Descartes constructed as noble a road of science, from the point at which he found geometry to that to which he carried it, as Newton himself did after him. ... He carried this spirit of geometry and invention into optics, which under him became a completely new art.

My art, what do you want to say about it? Do you think you can explain the merits of a picture to those who do not see them? . . . I can find the best and clearest words to explain my meaning, and I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art, and they have not understood; but among people who understand, words are not necessary, you say humph, he, ha and everything has been said.

Newton's apple and Cezanne's apple are discoveries more closely related than they seem.

It has been the office of art to educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty but our eyes have no clear vision.

Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them ... one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us ... an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace ... loose conciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them.

We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.

We are dreamers, shapers, singers, and makers. We study the mysteries of laser and circuit, crystal and scanner, holographic demons and invocations of equations. These are the tools we employ, and we know many things.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Astronomers have a common ground for discussion with musicians in the harmony of the stars and musical concords in tetrads and triads of the fourth and the fifth, and with geometricians in the subject of vision; and in all other sciences many points, perhaps all, are common so far as the discussion of them is concerned. But the actual undertaking of works which are brought to perfection by the hand and its manipulation is the function of those who have been specially trained to deal with a single art.