Coomaraswamy Quotes

#1. Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#2. All that is best for us comes of itself into our hands-but if we strive to overtake it, it perpetually eludes us.

Ananda Coomaraswamy

#3. When the mask of self-righteousness has been torn from us and we stand stripped of all our accustomed defenses, we are candidates for God's generous grace.

Erwin W. Lutzer

#4. We have come to think of art and work as incompatible, or at least independent categories and have for the first time in history created an industry without art.

Ananda Coomaraswamy

#5. Don't waste your life living out other people's expectations.

Tai Sheridan

#6. The man incapable of contemplation cannot be an artist, but only a skillful workman.

Ananda Coomaraswamy

#7. Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.

Ananda Coomaraswamy

#8. Your self is a cosmetic
fiction, a centrifuge.

Warren Heiti

#9. Above all, man must learn once again what he is and why he was created.

Rama P. Coomaraswamy

#10. Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

#11. The human rights we are to discuss here at Vienna are ... the quintessential values through which we affirm together that we are a single human community.

Radhika Coomaraswamy

#12. [...] Buddhism has been so much admired mainly for what it is not.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

#13. If dreams are like movies, the memories are films about ghosts.

Counting Crows

#14. Industry without art is brutality.

Ananda Coomaraswamy

#15. There is then no sacred or profane, spiritual or sensual, but everything that lives is pure and void.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

#16. It is only when the maker of things is a maker of things by vocation, and not merely holding down a job, that the price of things is approximate to their real value ...

Ananda Coomaraswamy

#17. The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man is a special kind of artist.

Ananda Coomaraswamy

#18. What we see in a democracy governed by "representatives" is not a government "for the people" but an organized conflict of interests that only results in the setting up of unstable balances of power.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

#19. Beauty is the attractive power of perfection.

Ananda Coomaraswamy

#20. The vocation, whether it be that of the farmer or the architect, is a function; the exercise of this function as regards the man himself is the most indispensable means of spiritual development, and as regards his relation to society the measure of his worth.

Ananda Coomaraswamy

#21. Be friendly to everybody; protect yourself; people sometimes want a piece of you for no good reason; and always do things out of love not fear.

Rashida Jones

#22. We must let the world know children's stories and we must take effective protective, legal and political actions to ensure that as many children as possible are spared the brutalities of war. Our joint action has, and will, make a difference, if only we make the effort.

Radhika Coomaraswamy

#23. Becoming is not a contradiction of being but the epiphany of being.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

#24. Man's activity consists in either a making or doing. Both of these aspects of the active life depend for their correction upon the contemplative life (that is, the Hero).

Ananda Coomaraswamy

#25. The most awkward means are adequate to the communication of authentic experience, and the finest words no compensation for lack of it. It is for this reason that we are moved by the true Primitives and that the most accomplished art craftsmanship leaves us cold.

Ananda Coomaraswamy

#26. No creature can attain a higher grade of nature without ceasing to exist.

Ananda Coomaraswamy

#27. What I have sought is to understand what has been said.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

#28. From one point of view becoming is a humiliation, and from another a royal procession.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

#29. The life or lives of man may be regarded as constituting a curve - an arc of time-experience subtended by the duration of the individual Will to Life.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

#30. Those who think of their house as only a 'machine to live in' should judge their point of view by that Neolithic man, who also lived in a house, but a house that embodied a cosmology.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

#31. Part broken - part whole, you begin again. ( from 'Why books seem shockproof against change.' THE TIMES: BOOKS)

Jeanette Winterson

#32. You should never have to beg for something that is part of your destiny.

Macie Holloway

#33. It is the natural instinct of a child to work from within outwards; "First I think, and then I draw my think." What wasted efforts we make to teach the child to stop thinking, and only to observe!

Ananda Coomaraswamy

#34. I'm a tomboy. I really love sports. I'm really looking forward to being the sniper gal, running around and shooting zombies. I find that really exhilarating.

Laurie Holden

#35. When I get lemon juice in a cut..it hurts..but then I remember all who would die for that lemon I am quiet and take the pain for what it is ...
because that is what it is to live.

Shawna Mae Lewis