Quotes About Art

O young artist, you search for a subject—everything is a subject. Your subject is yourself, your impressions, your emotions in the presence of nature.

The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes.

Painting is only a bridge linking the painter's mind with that of the viewer.

Draftsmen may be made, but colorists are born.

Fine works of art would never become dated if they contained nothing but genuine feeling. The language of the emotions and the impulses of the human heart never change (26 March 1854).

La musique est la volupté de l'imagination.

Beavers will invent a new way of building dams before architects accept a new method or a new style in their art (23 August 1854).

How strange painting is, it delights us with representations of objects that are not pleasing in themselves! (15 September 1854)

the outcome of my days is always the same; an infinite desire for what one never gets; a void one cannot fill; an utter yearning to produce in all ways, to battle against time that drags us along, and the distractions that throw a veil over our soul…….one works not only to produce art but to give value to time…. — Eugène Delacroix (1798 -1863)

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.

When the proportions are too perfect it detracts from a sense of the sublime. (13 January 1857)

Artists who seek perfection in everything achieve it in nothing (14 March 1858)

Even when we look at nature, our imagination constructs the picture. (1 September 1859)

Dans la peinture, il s'établit comme un pont mystérieux entre l'âme des personnages et celle du spectateur.

En littérature, la première impression est la plus forte.

A mere cast taken from nature will always be more real than the best copy a man can produce, for can anyone conceive that an artist's hand is not guided by his mind…his strange task will not be tinged with the colour of his spirit?...For the word realism to have any meaning all men would need to be of the same mind and to conceive things in the same way. For what is the supreme purpose of every form of art if it be not the effect? (22 February 1860)

La poesia, come il bene e il bello, è spesso contagiosa.

Todas as casas onde há livros e quadros e discos são bonitas. E são feias todas as casas, por mais luxuosas, onde faltem essas coisas." ?Eugénio de Andrade

Receding Surf The cool violence of wine; the furrows of receding surf; the morning whistle of the shepherd, more propitious for art than all the music of the spheres; this pride at having in one's heart the spilled milk of the stars.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

The Natural History Museum is open to the public on Tuesdays and Fridays. Elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus; extraordinary animals! Rubens rendered them marvelously. I had a feeling of happiness as soon as I entered the place and the further I went the stronger it grew. I felt my whole being rise above commonplaces and trivialities and the petty worries of my daily life. What an immense variety of animals and species of different shapes and functions!

The difficult pastoral art is to encourage people to grow in excellence and to live selflessly, at one and the same time to lose the self and find the self. It is paradoxical, but it is not impossible.

Wisdom is the art of living skillfully in whatever actual conditions we find ourselves.

When we read more books, look at more pictures, listen to more music, than we can possibly absorb the result of such gluttony is not a cultured mind but a consuming one; what it reads, looks at, listens to, is immediately forgotten, leaving no more traces behind it than yesterday's newspaper.'12