Quotes About Art

El arte abstracto no existe. Siempre tienes que empezar por algo y, luego, puedes eliminar cualquier rasgo de realidad.» Pablo Picasso

You have first to experience what you want to express. —Vincent van Gogh

I do believe in poetry. I believe that there are creatures endowed with the power to put things together and bring them back to life

A heartbreaking paradox: if only I can finish my work so that it will live. Yet if it is finished, completed , a part of me but departed from me, I lost it alive, living but separate; and if it does not leave me, it is incomplete, insufficient, and half-dead that I keep it.

What cannot letters inspire? They have souls; they can speak; they have in them all that force which expresses the transports of the heart....

The opera…is to music what a bawdy house is to a cathedral.

Os homens são os únicos animais que se devotam diariamente a tornar os outros infelizes. É uma arte como outra qualquer. Seus virtuoses são chamados de altruístas

A democracia é a arte e ciência de administrar o circo a partir da jaula dos macacos

The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature… the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.

An author, like any other so-called artist, is a man in whom the normal vanity of all men is so vastly exaggerated that he finds it a sheer impossibility to hold it in. His over-powering impulse is to gyrate before his fellow men, flapping his wings and emitting defiant yells. This being forbidden by the police of all civilized nations, he takes it out by putting his yells on paper. Such is the thing called self-expression.

I can't recall a single masculine figure created by a woman who is not, at bottom, a booby.

The most lovely moving picture actor, considered in the light of genuine aesthetic values, is no more than a piece of vulgarity; his like is to be found, not in the Uffizi gallery or among the harmonies of Brahms, but among the plush sofas, rococo clocks and hand-painted oil-paintings of a third-rate auction room.

I'd rather have written any symphony of Brahms' than any play of Ibsen's.

Only poetry or madness could do justice to the noises...

That's because only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear - the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness.

One can trace the relics of this former happiness in the trim shapes of the buildings, the occasional graceful churches, and the evidences of original art and background in bits of detail here and there - a worn flight of steps, a wormy pair of decorative columns of pilasters, or a fragment of once green space with bent and rusted iron railing.

There are my 'Poe' pieces and my 'Dunsany pieces' —but alas— where are any Lovecraft pieces?

Before long I was pretty nearly a devotee, and would listen for hours like a schoolboy to art theories and philosophic speculations wild enough to qualify him for the Danvers asylum.

And to think of today in contrast, with such pale-pink brains that even a club of supposed artists gets shudders and convulsions if a picture goes beyond the feelings of a Beacon Street tea-table! The only saving grace of the present is that it's too damned stupid to question the past very closely.

Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view.

summed up his principle of poetic composition this way: "Lotus flowers come out of limpid water, / Natural without any decoration.

The characteristics of the dynamics of humpback whale song, evolution at a rather steady rate, with occasional revolutions, match those of human art, music, and literature. In his 1990 book, The Clockwork Muse, Colin Martindale shows that trends over time in human art and music fit with laws derived from what we know of human psychology and the principles of cultural evolution.

Embi: And you're supposed to be so good at mending primuses, pastor Jón! Pastor Jón: And correspondingly bad at Baroque art. Embi: How do you know there are 133 pieces? Who has had time to dismantle this work of art so carefully? Or to count the bits? Pastor Jón: No one is so busy that he hasn't the time to dismantle a work of art. Then scholars wake up and count the pieces.

If there is such a thing as sin, then it is a sin not to be able to play a musical instrument.