9 Quotes by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Let us tell them the painful truth, that most of these works of art are about God, whom we never mention in polite society.

It is one of the prime errors of historical and rational analysis to suppose that the “truth” and “original form” of a legend can be separated from its miraculous elements. It is in the marvels themselves that the truth inheres.

If the “signs and wonders” are lightly dismissed, it is not because they are unreal, but because it is an evil and adulterous generation that asketh for a sign.

While there may have lived an individual teacher who gave the ancient wisdom its peculiarly “Buddhist” coloring, his personality is completely overshadowed, as he must have wished it should be, by the eternal substance with which he identified himself. In other words, “the Buddha is only anthropomorphic, not a man”.

What we see in a democracy governed by “representatives” is not a government “for the people” but an organized conflict of interests that only results in the setting up of unstable balances of power.

What I have sought is to understand what has been said.

Free thought is a passion; it is much rather the thoughts than ourselves that are free.

The life or lives of man may be regarded as constituting a curve – an arc of time-experience subtended by the duration of the individual Will to Life.

It is only when the maker of things is a maker of things by vocation, and not merely holding down a job, that the price of things is approximate to their real value.