A Quote by Seneca the Younger

That which achieves its effect by accident is not art.

Seneca the Younger

Quote Topics

Accident Art Effect Which

Quote Author

Seneca the Younger
Roman - Philosopher
4 BC - 65

Poetic effect is the peculiar effect of an utterance which achieves most of its relevance through a wide array of weak implicatures.

Dan Sperber

Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. (1804)

Benjamin Constant

There is no such thing as an accident. What we call by that name is the effect of some cause which we do not see.

Voltaire

The pause - that impressive silence, that eloquent silence, that geometrically progressive silence which often achieves a desired effect where no combination of words, howsoever felicitous, could accomplish it.

Mark Twain

Facility is an obstacle to any creativeness. In any art form. You get a nice effect without effort, sometimes by accident, and you're satisfied; but there's nothing substantial underneath.

Lilli Palmer

Half of art is accident, but there is no accident without free experiment.

Ralph Steadman

The artist Nature often achieves greatest effect when not working with a full palette.

Jim Perrin

Tragedy is an imitation not only of a complete action, but of events inspiring fear and pity. Such an effect is best produced when the events come on us by surprise; and the effect is heightened when, at the same time, they follow as cause and effect. The tragic wonder will then be great than if they happened of themselves or by accident; for even coincidences are most striking when they have an air of design.

Aristotle

Natural selection has ensured that each species achieves the requisite effect somehow, but it doesn't care, so to speak, how the trick is done.

David Papineau

Naturalistic art, as we know it, is an art which imitates the appearance of things, not as they are in reality, but as they appear at one moment from the point of view of a single spectator. This is the effect of perspective. Nothing of this sort existed in prehistory.

Sigfried Giedion

Without artists, the order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish.

Guillaume Apollinaire

What dance achieves, what play and sex achieve are the same thing that poetry achieves. They transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Jamake Highwater

That which takes effect by chance is not an art.

Seneca the Younger

Part of the triumph of modernist poetry is, indeed, to have demonstrated the great extent to which verse can do without explicit meaning and yet not sacrifice anything essential to its effect as art. Here, as before, successful art can be depended upon to explain itself.

Clement Greenberg

Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.