Quotes About Art

Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.

art is the link between appearance and reality.

All artist are of necessity in some measure contemplatives.

Piano performances by Condoleezza Rice are better than Hitler's paintings.

As for literatureIt gives no man a sinecure.And no one knows, at sight, a masterpiece."And give up verse, my boy,There's nothing in it."

Better mendacitiesThan the classics in paraphrase!

For three years, out of key with his time,He strove to resuscitate the dead artOf poetry; to maintain "the sublime"In the old sense. Wrong from the start—No, hardly, but seeing he had been bornIn a half savage country, out of date.

Colloquial poetry is to the real art as the barber's wax dummy is to sculpture.

Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.

Poetry must be as well written as prose.

No picture is made to endure nor to live withbut it is made to sell and sell quicklywith usura, sin against nature,is thy bread ever more of stale ragsis thy bread dry as paper.

Religion, oh, just another of those numerous failures resulting from an attempt to popularize art.

Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree.

It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.

A nation which neglects the perceptions of its artists declines. After a while it ceases to act, and merely survives. There is probably no use in telling this to people who can't see it without being told.

I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.

If anybody ever shuts you in Indiana...and you don't at least write some unconstrained something or other, I give up hope for your salvation.

Music rots when it gets too far from the dance. Poetry atrophies when it gets too far from music.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially. It is art that is made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be 'in on it'.

You are a fool to seek the kind of art you don't like. You are a fool to read classics because you are told to and not because you like them. You are a fool to aspire to good tastes if you haven't naturally got it.

L'art Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth, Crushed strawberries! Come, let us feast our eyes.

Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man. Gravity, a mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind.

The public will buy a certain amount of poetry if you give them their striptease." -- Ezra Pound