Art × Happiness

Art and Happiness

Browse 26 quotations catalogued under art with "happiness" in the text or topic label.

26 quotes

This collection contains 26 quotations filed under Art with "happiness" in the quote text or topic label. These keyword matches offer a starting point for exploring Art and Happiness; they do not by themselves establish a shared argument or a historical connection between the authors.

The authors represented include Bertrand Russell, Leon Trotsky, George Bernard Shaw, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. Read each quotation in its own context rather than assuming that these authors share a position.

One matching quotation reads: "To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness." The full quotation appears below.

Another matching quotation reads: "Socialist authors promise not only wealth for all, but also happiness in love for everybody, the full physical and spiritual development of…" Compare the wording and surrounding context to decide how each passage relates to your question.

Use the quotation links to explore individual entries and the author links to visit their profiles on QuoteLineage. For broader reading beyond these keyword matches, explore all Art quotes or the concept page for Happiness.

26 Quotes on Art and Happiness

"To be without some of the things you want is an indispensable part of happiness."

— Bertrand Russell

"Socialist authors promise not only wealth for all, but also happiness in love for everybody, the full physical and spiritual development of each individual, the unfolding of great artistic and scientific talents in all men, etc. Only recently Trotsky stated in one of his writings that in the socialist society "the average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” The socialist paradise will be the kingdom of perfection, populated by completely happy supermen. All socialist literature is full of such nonsense. But it is just this nonsense that wins it the most supporters."

— Leon Trotsky

"Riches and Art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty."

— George Bernard Shaw

"Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces belabored by time, certain twilights and certain places try to tell us something, or have said something we should not have missed, or are about to say something; this imminence of a revelation which does not occur is, perhaps, the aesthetic phenomenon."

— Jorge Luis Borges

"I would love to paint a large landscape of Moscow — taking elements from everywhere and combining them into a single picture—weak and strong parts, mixing everything together in the same way as the world is mixed of different elements. It must be like an orchestra.. .Suddenly I felt that my old dream was closer to coming true. You know that I dreamed of painting a big picture expressing joy, the happiness of life and the universe. Suddenly I feel the harmony of colors and forms that come from this world of joy."

— Wassily Kandinsky

"Improvements in housing—in which the Government has played a large part—is another direction in which standards have tended since the War to appreciate. Comfortable housing is an essential condition to the welfare and happiness of the people."

— Stanley Baldwin

"As for a few others, the vital task was a wedding of abstraction and surrealism. Out of these opposites something new could emerge, and Gorky’s work is a part of the evidence that this is true. What he felt, I suppose, was a sense of polarity, not of dichotomy; that opposites could exist simultaneously within a body, within a painting or within an entire art.. .These are the opposites poles in his work. Logic and irrationality; violence and gentleness; happiness and sadness, surrealism and abstraction. Out of these elements I think Gorky evolved his style."

— Adolph Gottlieb

"In this painting , I was in fact in quest for a certain hour, which was and which remains always the most beautiful hour of the day in Moscow. The sun is already low and has reached its highest force, which it has searched all the day, to which it has aspired all the day.. .The sun dissolves all Moscow in a spot, which as a frenzied tuba makes entered into vibration all the inner being, the whole soul.. .Rendering this hour seemed the biggest, the most impossible of the happiness for an artist. These impressions renewed every sunny day. They brought me a joy which shattered me until the bottom of the soul, and which reached until ecstasy."

— Wassily Kandinsky

"I look upon the Whigs as an anti-national party. ... Believing that the policy of the party was such as must destroy the honour of the kingdom abroad and the happiness of the people at home, I considered it my duty to oppose the Whigs, to ensure their discomfiture, and, if possible, their destruction."

— Benjamin Disraeli

"Were the happiness of the next world as closely apprehended as the felicities of this, it were a martyrdom to live."

— Thomas Browne

"... to my inexpressible happiness, she is my wife, and truly best part, without a single tinge of my defects"

— Ignatius Sancho

"The rich philistinism emanating from advertisements is due not to their exaggerating the glory of this or that serviceable article but to suggesting that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser."

— Vladimir Nabokov

"God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing."

— C. S. Lewis

"A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent, like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us."

— Daniel Webster

"It is of infinite moment, that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national Union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the Palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion, that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts."

— George Washington

"Sir, if you wish to avoid foreign commerce; give up all your prosperity. It is the thing protected, not the instrument of protection, that involves you in war. Commerce engenders collision, collision war, and war, the argument supposes, leads to despotism. Would the councils of that statesman be deemed who would recommend that the nation should be unarmed—that in the art of war, the material spirit, and martial exercises, should be prohibited—…—and that the great body of the people should be taught that the national happiness was to be found in perpetual peace alone? No, sir."

"We are all part of some cosmic pattern, and this pattern works toward good and not evil. It builds and does not destroy. So I shall go on in my search for a race where I can find kinship and happiness."

— Henry Kuttner

"A well proportioned mind is one which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that it will never cause its owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity."

— Thomas Hardy

"Each of us was interested in the work of the other members of our group, much as each of us was also interested in the health and happiness of the others. But we were still far from considering ourselves as a group or a school of art.. .I don't think we were ever as programmatic in out theories, as competitive or a self-assertive, as some of the modern schools of Paris."

— Gabriele Münter

"Art and religion have given man the only happiness he has ever had."

— Willa Cather

"The principle of utility judges any action to be right by the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interests are in question... if that party be the community the happiness of the community, if a particular individual, the happiness of that individual."

— Jeremy Bentham

"These little compositions are the expression of my happiness and that is why perhaps I am particularly fond of them."

— Amrita Sher-Gil

"I am tired of 'the fine art of unhappiness'."

— Denise Levertov

"Happiness is not essential to the artist; happiness never creates anything but memories."

— Frank Harris

"The thing about happiness is that it doesnt help you to grow; only unhappiness does that. So I'm grateful that my bed of roses was made up equally of blossoms and thorns. I've had a privileged, creative, exciting life, and I think that the parts that were less joyous were preparing me, testing me, strengthening me."

— Lana Turner

"Politics is the art of human happiness."

— H. A. L. Fisher

Key thinkers on this theme

Bertrand Russell· Philosophy Leon Trotsky· Politics George Bernard Shaw· Literature Jorge Luis Borges· Literature Wassily Kandinsky· Art

Related ideas in Art

All Art quotes Explore the idea of Happiness