Quote: Scientific Facts Are Generally Artistic Lies

"...scientific facts are generally artistic lies. Art has nothing to do with things as they are, but only with things as they appear to be, with the visual not the actual, with impressions, not with realities. It is a scientific fact, for instance, that trees are green, and yet it is only under the rarest combination of favoring circumstances that a tree is really green to the visual sense... Each rock, each tree, each waving field of grain has, of course, its fixed and definite local color, but the appearance of each of these objects changes a thousand times a day. And it is with this equation this fleeting, intangible, ever-shifting, ever-varying appearance, that artists have to do. The facts of nature are to him nothing, the mood everything..."

"Here then clearly lies the division line between science and art, the one gives us actual truths, the other visual truths; the one facts, the other moods, impressions, visions; each in its place admirable, each ministering to one of the two great needs of humanity, the physical and the spiritual."

Birge Harrison