See also: "What Art Is Trying to Tell You."
“Art has an infinite range. Nothing shifts so easily as taste and yet nothing so persistently avoids the directions in which it might find most satisfaction.”
“Born of suspended attention, [art] ends in itself. It encourages sensuous abstraction and nothing concerns it less than to influence the world.”
“Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.”
“To understand how the artist felt, however, isn’t criticism. Criticism is an investigation of what the work is good for.”
“Isaiah is scornful of idols made with hands because they have no physical energy; he forgets ... they represent something, and so have a spiritual dignity which things living and powerful never have, unless they too become representative, and express some ideal.”
“No personal talent avails to rescue an art from labored insignificance, when it had no steadying function in the moral world, and must between caprice and convention."
"If popular fancy finally sicken on games and fictions, it could find entertainment in the play of reality and truth."
"So utility leads to art when its vehicle acquires intrinsic value and becomes expressive"
“Spontaneous expression such as song, comes when internal growth in an animal system vents itself.”
“A change in object is the surest and most glorious way of changing a perception.”
Animal nature drives other creative behaviors as well, such as burrowing or collecting objects.
“These practices aren’t less spontaneous than the others, and no less expressive. But they seem more external because the traces they leave on the environment are more clearly marked.”
All instrumental arts, however indispensable, are burdens & should be abridged as much as possible
“A perception is itself an activity or art, and like all others, terminates in a product which is a good in itself, apart from its utilities.”
“To throw the whole mind upon something isn’t so great a feat when the mind has nothing else to throw itself upon.”
A reproduction established itself in the wake of death, representation confronted the dispersion born from experience.
The will “being elastic, grows definite and firm when it’s fed by success.”
"Reason in Art"
By George Santayana, 1905
“On those warm moments hang all our cold systematic opinions and while the latter that fill our days and shape our careers it is the only former that are crucial, and alive.”
“What might seem to us wrong about [art] is the expression of knowledge and passion beyond our range. It will suffice that we learn to live in the world of beauty, instead of merely studying its relics.”
“...A public performer of any sort that thrusts before us a spectacle justified only in his inner consciousness makes himself a nuisance. A social standard of taste must assert itself here, or else no efficacious and cumulative art can exist at all.”
“It will not suffer him to dote on things however seductive which rob him of some nobler companionship ... Good taste comes therefore from experience…”
“...For utility and logic are themselves beautiful, while a sensuous beauty that ran counter to reason could never be, in the end, pleasing to an exquisite sense.”
“Sense is the native element, and substance, of experience. All its refinements are still part of it, existentially.”
“Practical people might leave the artist alone in his oasis and even grant him a pittance on which to live, as they feed the animals in a zoological garden — did he not intrude into their innermost conclave and vitiate the abstract cogency of their designs.”
“To be interested in the changing seasons is ... a happier state of mind than to be hopelessly in love with spring. Wisdom discovers these possible accommodations as circumstances impose them...”
“It’s for want of education and discipline that a man so often insists petulantly on his random tastes, instead of cultivating those which might find some satisfaction in the world, and might produce in him some pertinent culture.”
“Tomes of aesthetic criticism hang on a few moments of real delight and intuition. It’s in rare and scattered instances that beauty smiles even on her adorers, who are reduced, for habitual comfort, to rendering her past favors.”
“In the actual disarray of human life and desire, wisdom consists in knowing what goods to sacrifice and what simples to pour into the supreme mixture.”
“It’s one thing to make room for genius and to respect the sudden madness of poets through which possibly some god may speak. And it’s quite another not to judge the results by rational standards.”
“After all, the chief interest we have in things lies in what we can make of them, or what they can make of us.”
“To be bewitched is not to be saved, though all the magicians and aesthetes in the world should pronounce it to be so.”
“The monks, knowing that men shouldn’t feed silently like stalled oxen, appointed someone to read aloud in the refectory.”
“Any absolute work of art which serves no further purpose than to stimulate an emotion, has a about it certain luxurious and visionary taint. We leave it with a blank mind, and a pang bubbles up from the very fountain of pleasure.”
“To impress a meaning and a rational form on matter is one of the most masterful of actions. The trouble lies in the barren and superficial character of this imposed form.”
All too often art “too much resembles an opiate, or a stimulant. Life and history are not thereby rendered better in their principle, but a mere ideal is extracted out of them and presented for our delectation in some cheap material, like words or marble.”
“When a mind is filled with important and true ideas and sees the actual relations of things, it can’t relish pictures of the world which wantonly misrepresent it.”
“Thus there would need to be no division of mankind into mechanical, blind workers, and half-demented poets, and no separation of useful from fine art, such as people make who have understood neither the nature nor the ultimate award of human action.”
“To gloat on rhythms and declamations, to live lost in imaginary passions and histrionic woes, is an unmanly life, cut off from practical dominion and from rational happiness.”
“By dwelling in its mock heaven, art may inflict on men the same kind of injury that any irresponsible passion or luxurious vice might inflict.”
“The artist becomes an abstracted trifler, and the public is divided into two camps: The dilettante who dote on the artist’s affectations and the rabble, who pay him to grow coarse. Both influences degrade him, and he helps to foster both.”
“In that rare case, his art will expand, as his understanding ripens. He won’t need to repent and begin again on a lower key.”
“A child plans towers of Babel. A mature architect in planning would lose all interest if he were bidden to disregard gravity and economy. The conditions of existence, once they are known and accepted, become conditions for the only pertinent beauty. In each situation, the plastic mind finds an appropriate ideal.”
“A dilettante may indeed summon inspiration whence he will, and a virtuoso will never lack some material to keep him busy.”
“They feel they are champions of what is most precious in the world, as a sentimental lady might fancy herself a lover of flowers when she pressed them in a book, rather than planting their seeds in the garden.”
“The wings of genius serve [the artist] only for an escapade, enabling him to skirt the perilous edge of madness and of mystical abysses.”
“...real men who can’t think it a real blessing to be lost in joys that don’t strengthen the character and yield nothing for posterity.”
“The wonder of an artist’s performance grows with the range of his penetration.”
“Emergence of arts out of instincts is the token and exact measure of nature’s success and mortal happiness."
