Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.

Nature and art: The material and the workmanship. There is no beauty unaided, no excellence that does not sink to the barbarous, unless saved by art: It redeems the bad and perfects the good. Because nature commonly forsakes us at her best, take refuge in art. The best in nature is raw without art, and the excellent is lacking if it lacks culture. Without cultivation everyone is a clown and needs polish, fine attributes notwithstanding.

Art does not surpass nature but perfects it.

"I have always thought that great artists were those who dared to confer the right of beauty on things so natural that people say on seeing them, "Why did I never realize before that that was beautiful too?

Art is the child of Nature.

Aren't maids the ultimate art critics?

Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.

The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

Art brings out the grand lines of nature. Antione Bourdelle

Beauty and art, no doubt, pervade all business of life like a kindly genius, and form the bright adornment of all our surroundings, both mental and material, soothing the sadness of our condition and the embarrassments of real life, killing time in entertaining fashion, and where there’s nothing to be achieved, occupying the place of what is vicious, better, at any rate, than vice.

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.
~Waddington

The best moments of life are those when we contemplate beauty in the purely artistic spirit — objectively. I