A Quote by Anais Nin

The ivory tower of the artist may be the only stronghold left for human values, cultural treasures, man’s cult of beauty.

Anais Nin

Quote Topics

Artist Beauty Cult Cultural Human Human Values Ivory Ivory Tower Left Man May Only Tower Treasures Values

Quote Author

Anais Nin
American - Novelist
February 21, 1903 - January 14, 1977

I am an idealist. I often feel I would like to be an artist in an ivory tower. Yet it is imperative that I speak to people, so I must desert that ivory tower. To do this, I am a journalist - a photojournalist. But I am always torn between the attitude of the journalist, who is a recorder of facts, and the artist, who is often necessarily at odds with the facts. My principle concern is for honesty, above all honesty with myself.

W. Eugene Smith

The only refuge left to us was the poet's ivory tower, which we climbed, ever higher, to isolate ourselves from the mob.

Gerard De Nerval

Wherefrom are human values to be derived and how are they to be developed? Human values are born along with human birth. They exist in union. Unfortunately, man today separates himself from human values and yet wants to live as a human being. To recover human values, man has to take the spiritual path.

Sathya Sai Baba

It is only when man cultivate humanness that society will shine with radiance and the nation and the world will progress. Humanness can be promoted only through spirituality and not by any other means. Just as a seed can sprout only when it is planted in the soil and watered, human values can grow only in a spiritual soil. If a man wants to cultivate human values, he has to apply the manure of spirituality to his heart, water it with love so that human values will grow.

Sathya Sai Baba

The commonest ivory tower is that of the average man, the state of passivity towards experience.

W. H. Auden

In the beautiful, man sets himself up as the standard of perfection; in select cases he worships himself in it. Man believes that the world itself is filled with beauty -he forgets that it is he who has created it. He alone has bestowed beauty upon the world -alas! only a very human, an all too human, beauty.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Religion, the dominion of the human mind; Property, the dominion of human needs; and Government, the dominion of human conduct, represent the stronghold of man's enslavement and all the horrors it entails.

Emma Goldman

I don't see myself in an ivory tower.

Jeff Buckley

Authentic thinking, thinking that is concerned about reality, does not take place in ivory tower isolation, but only in communication. If it is true that thought has meaning only when generated by action upon the world, the subordination of students to teachers becomes impossible.

Paulo Freire

The artist's life is to be where life is, active life, found in neither ivory tower nor concrete shelter; he must be out listening to everything, looking at everything, and thinking it all out afterward.

Sean O'Casey

Ivory may not be so white as snow, but the whole Arctic continent does not make ivory black.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

...it may be that there is no God, that the existence of all that is beautiful and in any sense good is but the accidental and ineffective byproduct of blindly swirling atoms, that we are alone in a world that cares nothing for us or for the values that we create and sustain - that we and they are here for a moment only, and gone, and that eventually there will be left no trace of us in the universe. A man may well believe that this dredful thing is true. But only the fool will say in his heart that he is glad that it is true.