6 Quotes About Classicism

If you're looking for some wise, inspirational, and funny classicism quotes, you'll find them below. Classicism is a style of architecture that has its origins in ancient Greece and Rome. Its aesthetic aims to recreate the grandeur of the classical world as it was known during antiquity. The Greek word kláos (κλάος), meaning "beauty" or "fine" is often used to describe this ideal Read more

The designs of classicism typically aim to make buildings appear much larger than they are by using the effect of distance and perspective rather than making them appear larger through scale. The below classicism quotes are taken from the book “The Art of Classicism” by Thomas Krens, which is based on lectures given at Harvard University in 1996.

1
I came to the Greeks early, and I found answers in them. Greece's great men let all their acts turn on the immortality of the soul. We don't really act as if we believed in the soul's immortality and that's why we are where we are today. Edith Hamilton
2
The scientific spirit, the contempt of tradition, the lack of discipline and the exaltation of the individual have very nearly made an end of art. It can only be restored by the love of beauty, the reverence for tradition, the submission to discipline and the rigor of self-control. Kenyon Cox
3
We would pay the bills. We would pretend to be high-class. This was compromise. This, I guessed, was business. Aryn Kyle
4
Feeling the inevitable claim of the this desert, he experienced a desire to throw off his civilized costume, hurl himself upon Josephina, either succumb, or return to Guadalajara, where men could only complain of having too many buttons to button or unbutton... Warren Eyster
5
It is in this sense that Nietzsche is driven, against many explicit resolutions to the contrary, to be a No-sayer. For what the décadents who surround him are doing is to say No where they should be saying Yes, where they should be Dionysian; and what is leading them to this life-denying perversity, mostly of course unconsciously, is that they subscribe to a set of values that puts the central features of *this* world at a discount. Where they find suffering, they immediately look for someone to blame, and end up hating themselves, or generalize that into a hatred of "human nature". They look for "peace of mind", using it as a blanket term and failing to see the diversity of states, some of them desirable and some of them the reverse, which that term covers. They confuse cause and effect, thinking that the connection between virtue and happiness is that the former leads to the latter, whereas in fact the reverse is the case. They have, in Nietzsche's cruelly accurate phrase, "the vulgar ambition to possess generous feelings" ("Expeditions of an Untimely Man, number 6). They confuse breeding fine men with taming them. Throughout the major part of Twilight this devastating list of our vulgarities continues. Michael Tanner