16 Quotes by Ananda Coomaraswamy

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.

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

Industry without art is brutality.

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

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

Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting ‘art’ as the words ‘artifact’ and ‘artificial’ imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.

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 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.