Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Ananda Coomaraswamy (Indian Art Historian)

Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947,) fully Ānanda Kentish Muthū Coomaraswāmy, was an Anglo-Sinhalese historian and philosopher of Indian art history, iconography, and symbolism. He was a champion of the early 20th century-revaluation of the aesthetics of Indian art.

Born to an eminent Sinhalese father and an English mother in Colombo, Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, Coomaraswamy moved to England at the age of two. He had an English upbringing and got educated at Wycliffe College and the University of London, where he earned a doctorate in geology. He returned to Ceylon in 1903 and got fascinated with reviving the interest in the lost traditions and culture of colonized people.

In 1906, Coomaraswamy became the director of Indian, Persian, and Islamic arts at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; he held this position for the rest of his life. He not only enhanced the museum’s Indian collections but also contributed significantly to the scholarship of Indian art throughout the world.

Coomaraswamy’s works spanned Indian art, music, dance, and Vedic literature and philosophy. Major publications such as The Dance of Śiva (1918) stressed the spiritual and yogic origins of Indian art. The Transformation of Nature in Art (1934) and Figures of Speech or Figures of Thought (1946) are collections of essays about the ideological parallels between the traditional arts of the East and those of the pre-Renaissance West.

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No man… can be a genius; but all men have a genius, to be served or disobeyed at their own peril.
Ananda Coomaraswamy

Art is the well making of what needs making.
Ananda Coomaraswamy

There is then no sacred or profane, spiritual or sensual, but everything that lives is pure and void.
Ananda Coomaraswamy

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.
Ananda Coomaraswamy

Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.
Ananda Coomaraswamy

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

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.
Ananda Coomaraswamy

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

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.
Ananda Coomaraswamy

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.
Ananda Coomaraswamy

We ‘preserve’ folk songs, at the same time that our way of life destroys the singer…we are proud of our museums, where we display the damning evidence of a way of life that we have made impossible.
Ananda Coomaraswamy

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