William Morris (curated) dictionary

Art edu­ca­tion: (…) gen­er­al capa­bil­i­ty in deal­ing with the arts. (TLA).
… I do not want art for a few, any more than edu­ca­tion for a few, or free­dom for a few. (TLA).

Art: (…) the human plea­sure of life is what I mean by art. (A&L).
(…) It is the art of the peo­ple: the art pro­duced by the dai­ly labour of all kinds of men for the dai­ly use of all kinds of men. (Idem.)
(…) ART IS MAN’S EXPRESSION OF HIS JOY IN LABOUR. (AuP).

Art and labor: (…) I under­stand by real art … the expres­sion by man of his plea­sure in labour. (AOP).

Art price: … the pro­vid­ing of a hand­i­crafts­man who shall put his own indi­vid­ual intel­li­gence and enthu­si­asm into the goods he fash­ions. (MB).

Art jus­tice: … so that we may adorn life with the plea­sure of cheer­ful­ly buy­ing goods at their due price; with the plea­sure of sell­ing goods that we could be proud of both for fair price and fair work­man­ship: with the plea­sure of work­ing sound­ly and with­out haste at mak­ing goods that we could be proud of? (TLA).

Aes­thet­ic sim­plic­i­ty: All art starts from this sim­plic­i­ty; and the high­er the art ris­es, the greater the sim­plic­i­ty. (BOL).
(…) have noth­ing in your hous­es which you do not know to be use­ful or believe to be beau­ti­ful. (TBL).

Beau­ty: …every­thing made by man’s hands has a form, which must be either beau­ti­ful or ugly; beau­ti­ful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is dis­cor­dant with Nature, and thwarts her. (TLA).

Beau­ty of life: that beau­ty … is what is meant by art. (BOL).

The hand­i­craft ques­tion: …have we not good rea­son for wish­ing, if it might be, that hand­i­craft should once more step into the place of machine-pro­duc­tion? (The Revival of Hand­i­craft)

Ugly: I have said that the pro­duce of man’s labour must be ugly if art be not applied to it. (ACT)

Form: … forms and intri­ca­cies that do not nec­es­sar­i­ly imi­tate nature, but in which the hand of the crafts­man is guid­ed to work in the way that she does, till the web, the cup, or the knife, look as nat­ur­al, nay as love­ly, as the green field, the riv­er bank, or the moun­tain flint. (TLA).

Pur­pose of art­work: To give peo­ple plea­sure in the things they must per­force use, that is one great office of dec­o­ra­tion; to give peo­ple plea­sure in the things they must per­force make, that is the oth­er use of it. (TLA).
(…) art will make our streets as beau­ti­ful as the woods, as ele­vat­ing as the moun­tain-sides: it will be a plea­sure and a rest, and not a weight upon the spir­its to come… (TLA).
(…) art made by the peo­ple and for the peo­ple as a joy to the mak­er and the user. (TLA).

Orig­i­nal­i­ty: (…) the essence of the art is that the dec­o­ra­tor’s art can­not be imi­ta­tive even to the lim­it­ed extent that the pic­ture-painter’s art is… (MB).
(…) your con­ven­tion must be your own, and not bor­rowed from oth­er times and peo­ples; or, at the least, that you must make it your own by thor­ough­ly under­stand­ing both the nature and the art you are deal­ing with. (Idem.)

Tra­di­tion: It is no longer tra­di­tion if it is servile­ly copied, with­out change, the token of life. (MB).

Prof­it: (…) for prof­it the work­man has been robbed of one plea­sure which as long as he is a work­man is per­haps his most impor­tant one: plea­sure in his dai­ly work: he is now only part of a machine. (A&L).

Art own­er­ship: He must be allowed to think of what he is doing, and to vary his work as the cir­cum­stances of it vary, and his own moods. He must be for ever striv­ing to make the piece he is at work at bet­ter than the last. (MB).

Craftsper­son­’s “due”: Mon­ey enough to keep him from fear of want or degra­da­tion … leisure enough from bread-earn­ing work to give him time to read and think … work enough of the kind afore­said … and last­ly, his own due share of art, a dwelling that … does not lack beau­ty. (MB).

Machines: (…) chiefly machines for car­ry­ing on the com­pe­ti­tion in buy­ing and sell­ing, called false­ly com­merce; and machines for the vio­lent destruc­tion of life (…) men’s work shall be fit for free men and not for machines. (AOP).
(…) we should be the mas­ters of our machines and not their slaves, as we are now. It is not this machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intan­gi­ble machine of com­mer­cial tyran­ny, which oppress­es the lives of all of us. (AP).
(…) why is he (Man) the slave to machin­ery? Because he is the slave to the sys­tem for whose exis­tence the inven­tion of machin­ery was nec­es­sary. (SC).

Medieval labor ideals: (…) the work of all hand­i­crafts in the Mid­dle Ages pro­duced beau­ty as a nec­es­sary part of the goods. (A&L).

Mam­mon-wor­ship: Four more church­es are to be sac­ri­ficed to the Mam­mon-wor­ship and want of taste of this great city. (DCC)

Indus­tri­al evil: … by far the most part of their lives in work, which at the best can­not inter­est them, or devel­op their best fac­ul­ties, and at the worst is mere unmit­i­gat­ed slav­ish toil, only to be wrung out of them by the sternest com­pul­sion. (TBL).

Sim­plic­i­ty of life: Sim­plic­i­ty of life, beget­ting sim­plic­i­ty of taste, that is, a love for sweet and lofty things, is of all mat­ters most nec­es­sary for the birth of the new and bet­ter art we crave for; sim­plic­i­ty every­where, in the palace as well as in the cot­tage. (TLA).
(…) is the absence of encum­ber­ing gew-gaws. (TBL).
(…) sim­plic­i­ty of life, even the barest, is not a mis­ery, but the very foun­da­tion of refine­ment. (PAC).
(…) Sim­plic­i­ty of life, beget­ting sim­plic­i­ty of taste, that is, a love for sweet and lofty things, is of all mat­ters most nec­es­sary for the birth of the new and bet­ter art we crave for; sim­plic­i­ty every­where, in the palace as well as in the cot­tage. (TLA).

Com­merce: (…) all Soci­ety rests on a gigan­tic sys­tem of usury, piti­less and implaca­ble, which is pre­pared to crush out of exis­tence all peo­ples and com­mu­ni­ties that can­not adapt them­selves to its laws. (OOA).
(…) com­mer­cial­ism has crushed the pow­er of com­bi­na­tion out of the low­er class­es, the Trades Unions, found­ed for the advance­ment of the work­ing class as a class, have already become con­ser­v­a­tive and obstruc­tive bod­ies, wield­ed by the mid­dle-class politi­cians for par­ty pur­pos­es. (AuP).
(…) The present posi­tion of the work­ers is that of the machin­ery of com­merce, or in plain­er words its slaves. (SC).
(…) That sys­tem, which I have called Com­pet­i­tive Com­merce, is dis­tinct­ly a sys­tem of war; that is of waste and destruc­tion. (AS).

List of cit­ed Mor­ris Essays

AS, Arts and Social­ism
AC, The Arts and Crafts of Today
SC, Sign Of the Change
AP, Arts and Its Pro­duc­ers
A&L, Art and Labour
DCC, Destruc­tion of City Church­es
PAC, The Prospects of Archi­tec­ture in Civ­i­liza­tion
MB, Mak­ing The Best Of It
AuP, Art Under Plu­tocrary
AOP, The Art of The Peo­ple
TLA, The Less­er Arts of Life
TBL, The Beau­ty of Life
OOA, Ori­gins of Orna­men­tal Art