"To Portray Rather than Explain"

(image source)


All except the quotes from Goethe are quoted in Pierre Hadot's essay "The Sage and the World" from Philosophy as a Way of Life
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Natural structures constitute both the initial and the final reference point of all imaginable beauty, although beauty is human appreciation. Since man himself belongs to nature the circle can be easily closed, and the feeling man has of beauty merely reflects his condition as a living being and an integral part of the universe. It does not follow from this that nature is the model of art, but rather that art constitutes a particular instance of nature: that which occurs when the aesthetic act undergoes the additional process of design and execution.

-Roger Caillois

[The artist's] progress in the observation and vision of nature gradually lets him accede to a philosophical vision of the universe which allows him freely to create abstract forms... Thus, the artist creates, or participates in the creation of works, which are an image of the creative work of God... Just as children imitate us while playing, so we, in the game of art, imitate the forces which created and continue to create the world... Natura naturans is more important to the painter than natura naturata.

-Paul Klee

Art no longer imitates visible things; it makes things visible. It is the blueprint of the genesis of things. Paintings show how things become things and how the world becomes a world... how mountains become in our view mountains."

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty

The desire for knowledge first stirs in us when we become aware of significant phenomena which require our attention. To sustain this interest, we must deepen our involvement in the objects of our attention and gradually become better acquainted with them. Only then will we notice all manner of things crowding in upon us. We will be compelled to distinguish, differentiate and resynthesize, a process which finally leads to an order we can survey with some degree of satisfaction.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This is what they all come to who continually harp on experience. They do not stop to consider that experience is only half of experience.

-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe