Best 14 quotes of Ananda Coomaraswamy on MyQuotes

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

Beauty is the attractive power of perfection.

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

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

Industry without art is brutality.

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. . . .

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!

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).

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.