Quotes About Art

The art of a great painting is not in any one idea, nor in a multitude of separate tricks for placing all those pigment spots, but in the great network of relationships among its parts. Similarly, the agents, raw, that make our minds are by themselves as valueless as aimless, scattered daubs of paint. What counts is what we make of them.

What had Van Gogh said? I would rather die of passion than of boredom.

sculpting is really a long series of decisions. When you make good ones, you have a product you like. When you make a bad one, you toss it and start again. And there are always lots of bad decisions. But the good ones are worth waiting for.

My woman. She had a momentary image of a caveman, hanging on to his woman by the hair with one hand while in the other he wielded a club to beat back caveman number two. Perhaps she would sketch it one day.

Why should you go further in it? What have you to gain from it? What, indeed? It is art for art's sake, Watson. I suppose when you doctored you found yourself studying cases without thought of a fee? For my education, Holmes. Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last. This is an instructive case. There

Why should you go further in it? What have you to gain from it?' 'What, indeed? It is art for art's sake, Watson. I suppose when you doctored, you found yourself studying cases without thought of a fee?' 'For my education, Holmes.' 'Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons with the greatest for the last.

He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.

Honesty and Poetry are the same thing

Well, perhaps, after all, it is of some little use," he remarked. "'L'homme c'est rien—l'oeuvre c'est tout,' as Gustave Flaubert wrote to Georges Sand.

She paints her face to hide her face. Her eyes are deep water. It is not for Geisha to want. It is not for geisha to feel. Geisha is an artist of the floating world. She dances, she sings. She entertains you, whatever you want. The rest is shadows, the rest is secret.

Remember, Chiyo, geisha are not courtesans. And we are not wives. We sell our skills, not our bodies. We create another secret world, a place only of beauty. The very word "geisha" means artist and to be a geisha is to be judged as a moving work of art.

Quali siano stati i nostri conflitti e i nostri trionfi, per quanto indelebile sia il segno che questi abbiano potuto lasciare su di noi, finiscono sempre per stemperarsi come una tinta ad acquerello su un foglio di carta.

I told my mother I thought someone had poked a hole in her eyes and all the ink had drained out

I don't think I really invented anybody. I have drawn on real life.

Het is een kwestie van durven, meer niet. Dat geldt voor alle kunst, dus ook voor die van het leven

The pressure of the environment cramps art as it cramps behaviour. One may challenge this environment, but one has to pay for it, and the price is neurotic guilt. There never was an intelligentsia without a guilt complex; it is the income tax one has to pay for wanting to make others richer.

Art, like religion, is a school of self-transcendence; it expands individual awareness into cosmic awareness, as science teaches us to reduce any particular puzzle to the great universal puzzle.

The decisive turning points in the history of every art-form are discoveries which show the characteristic features already discussed: they uncover what has always been there; they are 'revolutionary', that is, destructive and constructive; they compel us to revalue our values and impose a new set of rules on the eternal game.

there are no frontiers where the realm of science ends and that of art begins, and the uomo universale of the Renaissance was a citizen of both.

The history of art could be written in terms of the artist's struggle against the deadening cumulative effect of saturation. The way out of the cul-de-sac is either a revolutionary departure towards new horizons, or the rediscovery of past techniques, or a combination of both

material is the source for everything seen or said or done on the stage.

Great drama is great questions or it is nothing but technique. I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world.

Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use.

A book, a poem, a play — they start as fantasms but they end up as things, like a box of crackers or an automobile tire.