The Art of Living
As concerns the art of living, the material is your own life. No great thing is created suddenly. There must be time. Give your best and always be kind.
EPICTETUS, The Art of Living, 113
Some see beauty in a flower or sunset, some in a theatrical performance or a musical theme. But others see it in a person, as inner beauty, or in an act of courage or kindness.
PIRO FERRUCCI, Beauty and the Soul, 15
Every single act can be done with care or carelessly. Every single act can add to or detract from the sum total of beauty in our home and district.
JOHN LANE, Timeless Beauty, 159
There is an old saying that life itself is the biggest art. . . . The idea of art being the practice of finding connections, of fitting things together is very open ended [sic].
M. C. RICHARDS, Opening Our Moral Eye, 20-21
Art when really understood is the province of every human being. It is simply a question of doing things, anything, well. It is not an outside extra thing.
ROBERT HENRI, The Art Spirit, 11
Might not beauty, and the love of the beautiful, perhaps bring peace and harmony? Could it not carry us forward to new concepts of life’s meaning?
SOETSU YANAGI, The Unknown Craftsman104-5
In this culture [Navaho] people are encouraged continually to walk amid beauty, speak in beauty, act in beauty, and live in beauty.
PIERO FERRUCCI, Beauty and the Soul, 173
The great moral teachers of humanity were, in a way, artistic geniuses in the art of living.
ALBERT EINSTEIN. Ideas and Opinions, 51
So it is the Archiecture of Life itself that must be the fundamental and therefore first concern of any true culture anywhere.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: An Autobiography, 390
Linking Art, Science, and Religion
All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man’s life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual toward freedom.
ALBERT EINSTEIN, Out of My Later Years, 9
In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this [religious] feeling and keep it alive in those who are receptive to it.
ALBERT EINSTEIN, Ideas and Opinions, 38
The three main pillars of culture, art, science, and spirituality had become too compartmentalized and this was one of the fundamental causes of the fragmentation of contemporary thought today. If these three domains were able to recognize their interfaces clearly, it could provide a solid basis for the wholeness craved for by so many people.
LOUWRIEN WIJERSs, Art Meets Science and Spirituality, edited by Andreas Papadakis, Louwrien Wijers and Johan Pijnappel, 83
The sense in which “moral” means something to me is the sense in which religion, science, and art operate out of the same nucleus. The moral value is then compassionate, true, and enacted; a mystery of physical and psychic coordination is embodied in it.
M. C. RICHARDS, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person, 142
We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly.
ROBERT PIRSIG, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 294
If the day ever dawns when science, art, and religion become as one by recognizing each other’s faculties as different in reality, but really as reinforcing each other, we would then have something like the thing which is now missing.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, in Frank Lloyd Wright, by Olgivanna Wright, 94
Civilization has got to be something more than it has been if it’s ever going to be the great blessing and great joy that it might be, where art and religion join hands with science and all three get together, it would really make life beautiful.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, “The Seasons of Civilization,” a talk to Taliesin apprentices, 1954
Science and art and even religion must find expression, as one, in what we build.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, An Organic Architecture, 10
Organic architecture is no mere aesthetic nor cult nor fashion but an actual movement based on a profound idea of a new integrity of human life wherein art, religion and science are one.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, An Organic Architecture, 47
All the wisdom of science, the cunning of politics, and the prayers of religion can but stand and wait for the revelation—awaiting at the hands of the artist “conventionalization,” that free expression of life-principle which shall make our social living beautiful.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings, vol. 1, Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, editor, 125
No man is free who is afraid, and he’s afraid until he has developed the certainty that comes of a creative life, and a creative role in life, by way of art, religion, and science. The real body of the universe is spiritual. . . . Man is chiefly animal and until he makes something of himself by way of the spirit and becomes spiritual and aware, he’s not creative, he can’t be, until science and art and religion are more or less one, we’re not going to be safe.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, interview on June 18, 1957; https://openculture.com
Wright looked for the day when those involved in art, science and religion realized that their interest and source of inspiration are one and the same.
JOHN RATTENBURY, A Living Architecture, 16–17
Seeking Beauty, Truth, and Goodness
Beauty, truth, and goodness pursued for their own sakes would give us a working definition of art, science, and morality. These three ideals have represented man’s highest aspirations in every age and in every country.
PHILIP A. COGGIN, Art, Science, and Religion, 68
The ideal of the artist is beauty . . . the ideal of the scientist is truth, and of the moralist, goodness. Any one of these ideals is worth the devotion of a lifetime, . . . yet no one of them alone can satisfy man’s thirst for wholeness.
BRADFORD SMITH, Meditation: The Inward Art, 80
It is likely that the word “religion” is based upon the same root that gives us ligament and ligature, So it means to tie, to bind. Dictionaries usually derive the word from re-, meaning back, and lig-, meaning to bind. But re- also means anew. “To bind anew.” Isn’t this what religion really tries to do?—to bind truth and beauty and goodness together in one vision, to make us aware of wholeness, and thus to make us whole?
BRADFORD SMITH, Meditation, 80
For who can doubt, really, that a view of the universe not restricted by our human limitations would disclose that reality as it is intimated to us through truth, beauty and goodness—through art, science, and religion—would turn out to be a unity far more perfect than we can imagine, and far more beautiful?
BRADFORD SMITH, Meditation, 93
The scientist probes the universe looking for truth, the artist for beauty, the moralist for goodness. All have faith in the truth, the beauty or the goodness they look for. Without this faith they could not work. Inherent in the universe is a summation of all its meaning.
BRADFORD SMITH, Meditation, 203–4
The union of beauty with goodness and truth has been common enough to be regarded as natural. It is the dissociation which is unnatural and painful.
JOHN CROWE RANSOM, The World’s Body, 72
The ideals which have lighted my way, and time after time have given me new courage to face life cheerfully, have been Kindness, Beauty, and Truth.
ALBERT EINSTEIN, Ideas and Opinions, 9
You must, from your own observation, from your own sense of what is right and beautiful, good and true, make your own statement.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, quoted in A Living Architecture, John Rattenbury, 27
We instinctively feel the good, true, and beautiful to be essentially one in the last analysis. Within us there is a divine principle of growth to some end; accordingly we select as good whatever is in harmony with this law.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings, vol. 1, edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, 104
The expression we seek and need is that of harmony or of the good, known otherwise as the true, often spoken of as the beautiful, and personified as God.
FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT, The Essential Frank Lloyd Wright, edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, 72
Because religious humanists believe that whatever is good, true, and beautiful is part of God’s design, they have confidence that their faith can assimilate the works of culture. Assimilation, rather than rejection or accommodation, constitutes the heart of the religious humanist’s vision.
GREGORY WOLFE, The New Religious Humanists, xvi
Public discourse has increasingly come to be dominated by warring academic elites; there are fewer and fewer men and women of “letters”—non-academic artists and writers who balance a passion for truth and goodness with the concreteness that beauty demands.
GREGORY WOLFE, Beauty Will Save the World, xiii
In art, beauty takes the hard edges off truth and goodness and forces them down to earth, where they have to make sense or be revealed as imposters. . . . I’ve become an advocate for beauty as the necessary agent for rendering the claims of truth and goodness meaningful.
GREGORY WOLFE, Beauty Will Save the World, xiv
If the sense of beauty, then, is the gentle guide both to truth and to goodness, and if beauty itself, as defined in this book, is that inner principle, what are the implications for our present moment in history? Evidently it is incumbent on us, it is our good duty, to nurture the creative process of nature and to continue it in our own good work. . . . The new age that is coming will fall into that class of historical periods that we call renaissances—periods when past wisdom and beauty are recovered, inspiring radical innovation and changes.
FREDERICK TURNER, Beauty: The Value of Values, 135
Truth, goodness, and beauty form a triad of terms which have been discussed together throughout the tradition of western thought. They have been called “the three fundamental values” with the implication that the worth of anything can be exhaustively judged by reference to these three standards.
MORTIMER J. ADLER, A Syntopicon: An Index to the Great Ideas, 88
Mystical Experience
Mysticism means direct, immediate experience of ultimate reality.
WAYNE TEASDALE, The Mystic Heart, 20
Spirituality, like religion, derives from mysticism. For thousands of years before the dawn of the world religions as social organisms working their way through history, the mystical life thrived. This mystical tradition, which underpins all genuine faith, is the living source of religion itself.
WAYNE TEASDALE, The Mystic Heart, 10
Beauty in Science
Given an infinite number of theories that will logically explain the facts, scientists will sensibly always choose the most beautiful theory. For good reason: this is the way the world works. Beauty in this view is the highest integrative level of understanding and the most comprehensive capacity for effective action. It enables us to go with, rather than against, the deepest tendency or theme of the universe.
FREDERICK TURNER, The Culture of Hope, 218
Scientists and humanists alike should remember to elaborate not only the truth of their discoveries but the beauty of what has been discovered. Of all the elements of learning, the perception of beauty is at once the most delightful and the most suggestive of an underlying principle that unites the disciplines. Beauty is the lingua franca of all learning and therefore must be at the core of successful pedagogy.
ROBERT GRUDIN, The Grace of Great Things, 163
Recurrent references to “beauty” across the sciences suggest a new interest in this abstract idea as a link between the disciplines. As a unifying abstraction, the sense of beauty may conceivably spread to the social sciences and beyond, unfolding new topics of discourse and an aesthetic dimension in fields previously considered value free.
ROBERT GRUDIN, The Grace of Great Things, 195
There are millions of people around the world already tapping into the arts and aesthetics for health and wellness. In order for the field of neuroarts to reach its full potential and become accessible to everyone, it will need to be sustained and supported. This means that there must be an increase in interdisciplinary research, in training and education for diverse practitioners, in new public and private policies, and in funding. There also needs to be accurate and ongoing communication, both within the field and with the general public, on how to talk about this work and to bring the arts and aesthetics into our lives. The good news is that we’re already seeing strong global initiatives emerging around the arts and aesthetics. All disciplines from public health and education to business and technology are integrating the arts into their fields.
SUSAN MAGSAMEN and IVY ROSS, Your Brain on Art, 240-41