Art is born when the temporary touches the eternal.
Interpretation
Art captures fleeting moments and connects them to timeless truths.
This quote suggests that art emerges from the interplay between the transient experiences of life and the enduring aspects of existence. When a moment, which is inherently temporary, resonates with deeper, eternal truths, it transforms into art. Thus, art becomes a bridge linking the ephemeral with the everlasting, allowing us to experience the profound through the mundane.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of creativity in education.
Tradition does not mean a dead town; it does not mean that the living are dead but that the dead are alive. It means that it still matters what Penn did two hundred years ago or what Franklin did a hundred years ago; I never could feel in New York that it mattered what anybody did an hour ago.
I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the very best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them.
The ordinary scientific man is strictly a sentimentalist. He is a sentimentalist in this essential sense, that he is soaked and swept away by mere associations.
I suppose every one must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket; the pocket-knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past.
Madness does not come by breaking out, but by giving in; by settling down in some dirty, little, self-repeating circle of ideas; by being tamed.
To appropriate an invention, be it artistic or technical, you have to have at least a part of your spirit embracing it so radically that you somehow change.
I believe in previous lives and the Museβand that books and music exist before they are written and that they are propelled into material being by their own imperative to be born, via the offices of those willing servants of discipline, imagination and inspiration whom we call artists.
I want a painting to be difficult to do. The more obstacles, obstructions, problems - if they don't overwhelm - the better. I would like to feel that I am involved at any stage of the painting with all its moments, not just this 'now' moment where a superficial grace is so available.
I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.
Sweet bird, that shun the noise of folly, most musical, most melancholy!
Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.
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