Sculpture Quotes (3)
Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the georgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. (1902)
'The Study of Mathematics', Philosophical Essays (1910), 73-74. In Damien Broderick (ed.), Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge (2008), 104.
That sculpture is more admirable than painting for the reason that it contains relief and painting does not is completely false. ... Rather, how much more admirable the painting must be considered, if having no relief at all, it appears to have as much as sculpture!
Letter to Ludovico Cigoli. Quoted in Robert Enggass, Jonathan Brown, Italian and Spanish Art, 1600-1750 (1992), 22.
The science of government is my duty. ... I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
Letter to Abigail Adams, (1780). In John Adams and Charles Francis Adams, Letters of John Adams, Addressed to His Wife (1841), 68.
See also: | Agriculture (8) | Architecture (8) | Commerce (2) | Duty (7) | Geography (7) | Government (27) | Liberty (3) | Mathematics (217) | Natural History (6) | Philosophy (70) | Politics (18) | Porcelain (2) | Son (3) | Tapestry (2) | War (50)
