A monument's dimensions should be determined by the importance to civilization of the events commemorated.
Lincoln has been my first love, and as always with first loves, it fixed a standard. So I scaled sunlit heights with Lincoln and produced the colossal marble head in the rotunda of the capitol of the United States.
Motherhood is heroism. It is God-given, and yet men treat women as though of similar common clay, when in fact they are but lower than the angels.
American art ought to be monumental, in keeping with American life.
Beauty is like a soul that hovers over the surface of form. Its presence is unmistakable in art or in life.
You have here In New York one of the greatest and most picturesque and artistic structures in the world. I mean the Brooklyn Bridge.
There is art in everything - industry, education, play, all are forms of art.
There is none of that feeling about art that you meet everywhere in Europe. There you will hear people say, 'Oh, you must see such-and-such a statue at 4 o'clock in the afternoon; then the light is beautiful,' or, 'See this monument in the early morning; the light is best for it then.' Do you ever hear anything like that from an American?
The aim of art is to understand and establish order, which is another form of beauty.
Art does not exist for itself; it is but an avenue through and by which humanity expresses itself.
There is something in sheer volume that awes and terrifies, lifts us out of ourselves.
Each succeeding civilization forgets its predecessor. Civilizations are ghouls.
A city of homes should not be built as a business center.
An artist will starve unless he is near big centers of population. We should create many of these cultural centers right in our own slums.
I have a very unsatisfactory and incomplete knowledge of Brooklyn and cannot discuss specifically either what you can do here or what possibilities the city shows in an artistic way. I am not a foreigner but coming here as I do after a long stay abroad, I think things here strike me much as they strike a foreigner.
We have been concentrating on the banks, business and our bellies. We have neglected the spiritual and cultural. It was because Rome and Athens neglected these things that they fell.
Renaissance always comes out of depression.
Man's soul is strengthened by suffering.
I believe and find in my study of art that the real artist is nine-tenths of the time a craftsman, and it is only in that small one-tenth of the time that he rises to the elevated position of a prophet and a master.
I was born in the Golden West, reared in the arms of the Church, deluged with saints to draw from, and suckled on Italian art: my slates were covered from end to end with portraits of Savonarola, Fra Angelico, and Wild Bill and Sitting Bull; I knew all equally well and admired them about alike.
