Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.

value exists only where there is consciousness. Where nothing ever is felt, nothing matters.

Is it conceivable that mysticism is a mark of inadequate art?

The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.

The power of understanding symbols, i.e. of regarding everything about a sense-datum as irrelevant except a certain form that it embodies, is the most characteristic mental trait of mankind. It issues in an unconscious, spontaneous process of abstraction, which goes on all the time in the human mind: a process of recognizing the concept in any configuration given to experience, and forming a conception accordingly. That is the real sense of Aristotle's definition of Man as "the rational animal".

Only a creature that can think symbolically about life can conceive of its own death. Our knowledge of death is part of our knowledge of life.

All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.