A Quote by Theo van Doesburg

In all these products, whether iron bridges, locomotives, automobiles, telescopes, cottages, airport-hangars, funicular railways, skyscrapers, or children's toys, the will towards a new style expresses itself. The similarity of these examples to the new creations in art consists in the same striving for clear, pure form which expresses truth in the objects.

Theo van Doesburg

Quote Topics

Airport Art Bridges Children Clear Consists Cottages Creations Examples Expresses Form Iron Itself Locomotives New Objects Products Pure Railways Same Similarity Skyscrapers Striving Style Telescopes Towards Toys Truth Whether Which Will

Quote Author

Theo van Doesburg
Dutch - Artist
August 30, 1883 - April 7, 1931

One cannot conquer the evil in himself by resisting it ... but by transmuting its energies into other forms. The energy that expresses itself in the form of evil is the same energy which expresses itself in the form of good; and thus the one may be transmuted into the other.

Charles Henry Mackintosh

Political art expresses the cliches you agree with, unlike propaganda, which expresses the cliches you don't.

Brad Holland

With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper. In an industrial community this propensity for emulation expresses itself in pecuniary emulation; and this, so far as regards the Western civilized communities of the present, is virtually equivalent to saying that it expresses itself in some form of conspicuous waste.

Thorstein Veblen

The wood-carver can fashion whatever he will. Yet his products are but toys of the moment, to be glanced at in jest, not fashioned according to any precept or law. When times change, the carver too will change his style and make new trifles to hit the fancy of the passing day. But there is another kind of artist, who sets more soberly about his work, striving to give real beauty to the things which men actually use and to give to them the shape which tradition has ordained. This maker of real things must not for a moment be confused with the maker of idle toys.

Murasaki Shikibu

I don't think Beethoven expresses religious truth. He expresses a human truth.

John Tavener

Art does not exist for itself; it is but an avenue through and by which humanity expresses itself.

Gutzon Borglum

All great art is by its very essence in conflict with the society with which it exists. It expresses the truth about the existence regardless of whether this truth serves or hinders the survival purpose of a given society. All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.

Erich Fromm

What basketball expresses is what jazz expresses. Certain cultural predispositions to make art. All African-American art has a substratum, or baseline, of improvisation and spontaneity. You find that in both basketball and jazz.

John Edgar Wideman

Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself only with fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth.

Antonio Tabucchi

Art is not an end in itself. It introduces the soul into a higher spiritual order, which it expresses and in some sense explains.

Thomas Merton

Art is one of the sources through which the soul expresses itself and inspires others. But to express art thoroughly, one must have the inner emotions opened thoroughly.

Meher Baba

The work of art expresses precisely those things which do not die. It must do so, however, in a form that bears witness to the artist's own era.

Constantin Brancusi

There is, however, in art another kind of external similarity which is founded on a fundamental truth. When there is a similarity of inner tendency in the whole moral and spiritual atmosphere, a similarity of ideals, at first closely pursued but later lost to sight, a similarity in the inner feeling of any one period to that of another, the logical result will be a revival of the external forms which served to express those inner feelings in an earlier age.

Wassily Kandinsky

Art never expresses anything but itself.

Oscar Wilde

Writing generally, it may be said that in design, roof, and general aspect, Japanese Buddhist temples are all alike. The sacred architectural idea expresses itself in nearly the same form always.