A Quote by Octavio Paz

A glass pitcher, a wicker basket, a tunic of coarse cloth. Their beauty is inseparable from their function. Handicrafts belong to a world existing before the separation of the useful and the beautiful.

Octavio Paz

Quote Topics

Basket Beautiful Beauty Before Belong Cloth Coarse Existing Function Glass Handicrafts Inseparable Pitcher Separation Useful World

Quote Author

Octavio Paz
Mexican - Poet
March 31, 1914 - April 19, 1998

Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Even the simplest wicker basket can become priceless when it is loved and cared for through the generations of a family.

Sister Parish

Nothing is arbitrary, nothing is insulated in beauty. It depends forever on the necessary and the useful. The plumage of the bird, the mimic plumage of the insect, has a reason for its rich colors in the constitution of the animal. Fitness is so inseparable an accompaniment of beauty, that it, has been taken for it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The cart before the horse is neither beautiful nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must bestripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living laid for a foundation.

Henry David Thoreau

I tend to think that immortal souls, invisible sky daddies, and Santa Claus all belong in the same basket. The disposition of that basket is left as an exercise for the reader.

Charles Stross

The Bauhaus strives to bring together all creative effort into one whole, to reunify all the disciplines of practical art - sculpture, painting, handicrafts, and crafts - as inseparable components of a new architecture.

Walter Gropius

It is not expensive to be beautiful. It takes only a little effort to be presentable and beautiful. But it takes some effort. And unfortunately people think of beauty as luxury, beauty as frivolity, ... or extravagance. Beauty is a discipline, beauty is art, is harmony, in the ideological sense and in the theological sense, beauty is God and love made real. And the ultimate reach in this world is beauty.

Imelda Marcos

I went [to Hobby Lobby] this morning and bought the cutest little wicker basket to hold all my morning-after pills.

Cecily Strong

Beautiful women, whose beauty meant more than it said... was their brilliancy always fed by something coarse and concealed? Was that their secret?

Willa Cather

Sunshine of late afternoon-- On the glass tray a glass pitcher, the tumbler turned down, by which a key is lying--And the immaculate white bed

William Carlos Williams

The contents of the glass don’t matter; what’s more important is to realize there’s a pitcher of water nearby. In other words, we have the capacity to refill the glass, or to change our outlook.

Shawn Achor

So long as we find anything beautiful, we feel that we have not yet exhausted what [life] has to offer […] That forward-looking element is … inseparable from the judgment of beauty.

Alexander Nehamas

A man-made thing that produces pleasure (and criticism) by somehow taping into the order of the universe is beautiful. Making beautiful things makes our lives worthwhile. My teacher, and one of the founders of the Pratt industrial design program, Rowena Reed Kostellow, said, "Pure, unadulterated beauty should be the goal of civilization." From a pragmatic point of view, for something to be beautiful, it has to work. In order to make this idea clearer I have combined the ideas of beauty and function into one word: Beautility.

Tucker Viemeister

For the first time, I wasn't embarrassed by the look of beauty, of elegance, because when you see someone who has only one rag as their property, but it happens to be beautiful and pink and silk, beauty doesn't have to be separated... I have always said that you shouldn't have biases, you shouldn't have prejudices. But before that [before his trip to India, circa 1975] I'd never been able to use purple, because it was too beautiful.