“Beautiful architectural undertakings, while appearing to be material, and succeeding by the laws of American enterprise, bring with them the healing hand of beauty. Beauty is not directly pious, but does more civilizing in its proper hour than many sermons or laws.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“The people still has to learn the great difference between true enjoyment and fleeting pleasure, between real beauty and the mere tickling of the senses.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“But the greatest mission which the photoplay may have in our community is that of esthetic cultivation. No art reaches a larger audience daily, no esthetic influence finds spectators in a more receptive frame of mind.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“Hardly any teaching can mean more for our community than the teaching of beauty where it reaches the masses. The moral impulse and the desire for knowledge are, after all, deeply implanted in the American crowd, but the longing for beauty is rudimentary; and yet it means harmony, unity, true satisfaction, and happiness in life.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“Pictures of Action Intimacy and Splendor are the foundation colors in the photoplay, as red, blue, and yellow are the basis of the rainbow.”
— Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1922)
“We recognized that art is a way to overcome nature and to create out of the chaotic material of the world something entirely new, entirely unreal, which embodies perfect unity and harmony.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“In the highest achievements of the art of words, the dramatic and the pictorial, the moral and romantic interest, rise and fall together by a common and organic law. Situation is animated with passion, passion clothed upon with situation.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
“As in music the melody and rhythms belong together, as in painting not every color combination suits every subject, and as in poetry not every stanza would agree with every idea, so the photoplay must bring action and pictorial expression into perfect harmony.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“For the first time the psychologist can observe the starting of an entirely new esthetic development, a new form of true beauty in the turmoil of a technical age, created by its very technique and yet more than any other art destined to overcome outer nature by the free and joyful play of the mind.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“The esthetically commonplace will always triumph over the significant unless systematic efforts are made to reenforce the work of true beauty.”
— Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916)
“The right kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in music.”
— Robert Louis Stevenson, A Gossip on Romance (in Memories and Portraits) (1882)
The Salon library
This is today’s sample of twelve. The whole collection is in the Salon.
Salon members read all 746 English quotes and the Afrikaans collection too, with every filter,
the plain-words notes from A Year with the Muses, the quotes they save, and a private journal for the lines that stay with them.
Join the SalonAlready a member? Open the library →
Every quote in this collection was verified
against its original public-domain source — the letter, journal, poem or treatise it
truly comes from. No internet folklore, no misattributions.
Start free to bring these voices into your daily practice.