Quotes About Art

No poem is intended for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the listener.

Fiction is an Art, and, like all other Arts, that it is governed by certain laws, methods, and rules, which it is their first business to learn.

The older I get, the more I see how much motivations matter. The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music.

Form follows emotion

Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too.

That the manufacture of consent is capable of great refinements no one, I think, denies. The process by which public opinions arise is certainly no less intricate than it has appeared in these pages, and the opportunities for manipulation open to anyone who understands the process are plain enough. The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out.

Why did Baudelaire — why does anyone — write poetry, in the teeth of all the evidence that one wants you to do so? No one wants you to write it and having written it in spite of them, no one wants to read it. Above all, no one wants to pay for it. For better or worse, a poem has a hard time turning into a commodity.

Und nun verstand ich es, das Geheimnis der Musik, ich verstand, warum sie allen anderen Künsten so turmhoch überlegen ist: Es ist ihre Körperlosigkeit. Wenn sie sich einmal von ihrem Instrument gelöst hat, dann gehört sie wieder ganz sich selbst, ist ein eigenständiges freies Geschöpf aus Schall, schwerelos, körperlos, vollkommen rein und in völligem Einklang mit dem Universum.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written, that's all.

Poetry teaches us music, metaphor, condensation and specificity.

My father always taught by telling stories about his experiences. His lessons were about morality and art and what insects and birds and human beings had in common. He told me what it meant to be a man and to be a Black man. He taught me about love and responsibility, about beauty, and how to make gumbo.

Film editing is now something almost everyone can do at a simple level and enjoy it, but to take it to a higher level requires the same dedication and persistence that any art form does.

it often occurs that a work of art — even though incomprehensible — remains in the mind, and produces its effect years later, when people are apt to remark that it was not the same as when they first saw it, transferring to the object under discussion the chance in themselves.

America was living off the canned foods of art, the things held over from years before. It knew, vaguely, that there was fresh fruit, fresh meat on the tables of Paris, and it wanted its share.

Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.

Hay cosas que no están hechas para pensar, sino para vibrar con ellas

Music is God's gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven.

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;Nature I loved; and next to Nature, Art.I warm'd both hands before the fire of life;It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

Prose on certain occasions can bear a great deal of poetry; on the other hand, poetry sinks and swoons under a moderate weight of prose.

Dying Speech of an Old Philosopher I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art: I warm'd both hands before the fire of life; It sinks; and I am ready to depart.