Art & creativity quotes, explained

The first line of Keats's long poem Endymion: beautiful things never lose their power to delight us, and their loveliness grows over time instead of fading.

Art is not meant to teach, preach or serve a practical purpose. Its value is that it is beautiful and gives pleasure, the way a flower does.

The melancholy Jaques compares life to a play in seven acts, from baby to old age. It is a witty, gloomy view of life that the play quietly answers.

A skill takes so long to master that one lifetime is barely enough. It is a call to start now and to respect how much there is to learn.

Beautiful things do not need a purpose to justify them. A flower blooming where no one sees it is reason enough in itself.

The urn tells us that beauty and truth are the same thing, and that this is the only wisdom people need. Whether Keats himself believed it, or is letting the urn speak for itself, is still debated.

Polonius declares that being brief is the essence of intelligence, in the middle of one of the longest-winded speeches in the play. “Wit” meant good sense, not just humor.

Einstein says knowledge is limited to what we already understand, while imagination reaches beyond it. He was describing how he made discoveries.