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The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.

— Hippolyte Taine Philosophy of Art (1865)

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More quotes by Hippolyte Taine

I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.

The way to be bored is to know where you are going and the way to get there.

Napoleon, far more Italian than French, Italian by race, by instinct, imagination, and souvenir, considers in his plan the future of Italy, and, on casting up the final accounts of his reign, we find that the net profit is for Italy and the net loss is for France.

Napoleon's Views of Religion (1891)

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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)

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