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I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

— Henry Adams

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Art

More quotes by Henry Adams

I know of nothing useful in life except what is beautiful or creates beauty.

Esther: A Novel (1884)

It's always the good men who do the most harm in the world.

Every one who marries goes it blind, more or less.

Esther: A Novel (1884)

We never despised the world or its opinions, we only failed to find out its existence.

Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.

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All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Henry Adams (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.