Quotes About Art

Works of art can be described as having an essence of eternal solitude and an understanding is attainable least of all by critique. Only love can grasp and hold them and can judge them fairly.

Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism; they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings.

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism.

Nothing can touch a work of art less than critical words; all that comes of that are more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things are not as easy to understand and say as we might prefer to believe; most events are inexpressible, happening in a space where no word has ever set foot, and most inexpressible of all are works of art, mysterious existences, whose life continues as ours passes away.

Read as little as possible in the way of aesthetics and criticism - it will either be partisan views, fossilized and made meaningless in its lifeless rigidity, or it will be neat wordplay, where one opinion will triumph one day and the opposite the next. Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice.

To be an artist means not to compute or count; it means to ripen as the tree, which does not force its sap, but stands unshaken in the storms of spring with no fear that summer might not follow.

Most events are inexpressible, and take place in a sphere that no word has ever entered. Most inexpressible of all are works of art, existences full of secrets whose life continues alongside ours, while ours is transitory.

God is love, I said, but art's the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.

I'd like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing What Did I Do to Be so Black and Blue-all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound.

The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life's crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.

Beauty without expression is boring.

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Every word was once a poem.

Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.

Practice radical humility. He (or she)who masters the art of humility cannot be humiliated...

In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire.

The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce.

The most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no hand to paint them to the senses.

The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things

For poetry was all written before time was, and whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings and attempt to write them down, but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem. The men of more delicate ear write down these cadences more faithfully, and these transcripts, though imperfect, become the songs of the nations.

In happy hours, nature appears to us one with art; art perfected, -- the work of genius. And the individual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to all the great human influences overpower the accidents of a local and special culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.