Lift yourself through the arts.

 Architect Will Price address to the Eastern Manual Education Association, 1904:

"Man at first was a naked, cold, hungry animal in a cold and strenuous world, and out of that, because of that, man is becoming worth while. That very weakness, that very nakedness, tested the ingenuity of man, compelled him to invent. Out of such invention two things came to him; in the first place, a great joy in the sense of creation; in the second place, a development because of that work.

"Man then endeavored to express his new point of view; because with his development came a new outlook, a new meaning to the rolling cloud and to the rushing water and to the lightning, to the song of the birds; and so, art was born. Art is not, as has been said, “the visible evidence of man’s joy in his work,” because it is that very joy and that very work itself.

"If art was the visible evidence of man’s joy in his work, then the rich would indeed, as they think they do, possess the hoarded treasures of the world; whereas they but gather the crumbs that fall from the artist’s table.

"The real joy, the real good there is in art (and by art I mean the art of making the dishpan as much as a statue of Phidias), the real motive of art after all, when you analyze it, is simply to make us worthwhile, to made us fit to love and be loved, fit to live together."

Make art. Lift yourself through the arts. Make the world a better place.