Quotes from Ananda Coomaraswamy

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

The inferior man regulates his life by externals: inasmuch as he is constrained by desire for long life, reputation, riches, rank or offspring, he is not free. The superior man is of another sort, and of him it may be said, with Chuan Tzu, 'that they live in accordance with their own nature. In the whole world they have no equal. They regulate their life by inward things.

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.

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

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).

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

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!