8 Quotes by Titus Burckhardt

Beauty always represents an inward and inexhaustible equilibrium of forces; and this overwhelms our soul, since it can neither be calculated nor mechanically produced. A sense of beauty can therefore permit us the direct experience of relationships before we can perceive them, in a differentiated manner, with our discursive reason; in this, incidentally, there is a defence for our own physical and psychic well-being, something that we cannot neglect with impunity.

It is necessarily so, since every traditional art obeys a particular spiritual economy that limits its themes and means of expression, so that an abandonment of that economy almost immediately releases new and apparently unlimited artistic possibilities.

In reality, the apparent 'objectivity' of modern architecture is merely a mysticism in reverse, a congealed sentimentality disguised as objectivity; moreover one has seen often enough just how quickly this attitude is converted, in its protagonists, into the most changeable and arbitrary of subjectivisms.

St. Hierotheos, the great teacher quoted by Dionysius in his book on Divine Names: “As form giving form to all that is formless, in so far as It is the principle of form, the Divine Nature of the Christ is none the less formless in all that has form, since It transcends all form....

A craft can only have meaning when it serves a spiritual way.

One of the fundamental conditions of happiness is to know that everything that one does has a meaning in eternity.

Whereas previously men were differentiated only by their culture, the community is all of sudden split into economically determined classes and, with the cheap products of the factory, a poverty without beauty invades the homes; ugly, senseless, and comfortless poverty is the most widespread of all modern achievements.

St. Hierotheos, the great teacher quoted by Dionysius in his book on Divine Names: “As form giving form to all that is formless, in so far as It is the principle of form, the Divine Nature of the Christ is none the less formless in all that has form, since It transcends all form...