Quotes About Art

If there is on earth, and among all these things of nothing, a belief worthy of adoration, if there is anything holy, pure and sublime, anything answering that immoderate desire for the infinite and the vague that we call the soul, it is art.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

With my burned hand, I write about the nature of fire.

But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire. She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated.

The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature.

Il faut mettre son cÅ"ur dans l'art, son esprit dans le commun du monde, son corps où il se trouve bien, sa bourse dans sa poche, son espoir nulle part.

With a little more time, patience, and hard work, and above all with a more sensitive taste for the formal aspects of arts, he would have managed to write mediocre poetry, good enough for a lady's album – and this is always a gallant thing to do, whatever you may say.

Art requires neither complaisance nor politeness; nothing but faith, faith and freedom.

Alas! It seems to me that when one is as good as this at dissecting children who are to born, one can't stiffen up enough to create them.

Pellerin used to read every available book on aesthetics, in the hope of discovering the true theory of Beauty, for he was convinced that once he had found it he would be able to paint masterpieces.

I refuse to consider Art a drain-pipe for passion, a kind of chamberpot, a slightly more elegant substitute for gossip and confidences. No, no! Genuine poetry is not the scum of the heart.

Art, like the Jewish God, wallows in sacrifices. So tear yourself to pieces, mortify your flesh, roll in ashes, smear yourself with filth and spittle, wrench out your heart! You will be alone, your feet will bleed, an infernal disgust will be with you throughout your pilgrimage, what gives joy to others will give none to you, what to them are but pinpricks will cut you to the quick, and you will be lost in the hurricane with only beauty's faint glow visible on the horizon.

He had that incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for social conventions, that seduces or exasperates them.

The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature.

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe

Ama l'arte; fra tutte le menzogne è ancora quella che mente di meno.

The only way not to be unhappy is to shut yourself up in art, and count everything else as nothing.

Amad el arte. De todas las mentiras es la menos mentirosa.

Nessuno, mai, riesce a dare l'esatta misura di ciò che pensa, di ciò che soffre, della necessità che lo incalza, e la parola umana è spesso come un pentolino di latta su cui andiamo battendo melodie da far ballare gli orsi mentre vorremmo intenerire le stelle.

Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly; ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling than to conjure away the burden and bitterness.

Las emociones extraordinarias producen las obras sublimes.

Gustave Flaubert

But that happiness, no doubt, was a lie imagined in despair of all desire. She now knew the pettiness of the passions which art exaggerated.

L'art d'écrire est l'art de découvrir ce en quoi vous croyez.