Quotes About Art

La Belleza, Fedro, tenlo muy presente, solo la Belleza es a la vez visible y divina, y por ello es también el camino de lo sensible, es, mi pequeño Fedro, el camino del artista hacia el espíritu.

Lyotard remarked that post-Modern artists often function as philosophers. They may deal with issues of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, as many influential critics today approach art through philosophy.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.

I had learned from my own father that it was almost blasphemy to regard the function of art as merely to reproduce some kind of a sensible pleasure or, at best, to stir up the emotions to a transitory thrill. I had always understood that art was contemplation, and that it involved the action of the highest faculties of man.

El Greco is not for a lot of people and perhaps he never was. That is, he is plenty complex, and most people cannot get at him all at once because they are not all that complex themselves.

That is precisely why you will miss all the deepest meaning of Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest if you reduce their vital and creative statements about life and men to the dry, matter-of-fact terms of history, or ethics, or some other science. They belong to a different order.

I, who had always been anti-naturalistic in art, had been a pure naturalist in the moral order. No wonder my soul was sick and torn apart: but now the bleeding wound was drawn together by the notion of Christian virtue, ordered to the union of the soul with God.

Music, oh, how faint, how weak, Language fades before thy spell! Why should Feeling ever speak, When thou canst breathe her soul so well?

There is no literature and art without paranoia. Probably there would be even civilization. Paranoia is the world. It is the attempt to make sense of what has not.

If he is going into management, he writes. If he is an engineer or architect why he paints or sculpts. He will straddle the line, aware up to the point of knowing he is getting the worst of both worlds, but never stopping to wonder why there should ever be a line, or even if there is a line at all.

Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry.

Bianca is usually silver, or of no color at all: thousands of times taken, strained through glass, warped in and out the violet-bleeding interfaces of Double and Triple Protars, Schneider Angulons, Voigtländer Collinears, Steinheil Orthostigmats, the Gundlach Turner-Reichs of 1895.

Blues is a matter of lower sidebands—you suck a clear note, on pitch, and then bend it lower with the muscles of your face.

I am offended only by certain sorts of wallpaper

Words may be false and full of art, Sighs are the natural language of the heart.

Que noche! dijo -¿Conosce usted ese poema de Safo sobre sus manos en las estrellas...? Soy curiosamente sáfica. Y eso es tan importante... No sólo soy sáfica; encuentro en las obras de arte de todos los grandes autores, sobre todo en sus cartas inédtas, cierto aire, cierto indicio de mí misma... cierto parecido, cierta parte de mí misma, como mil reflejos de mis propias manos en un espejo oscuro El espirítu moderno - En un balneario alemán

Muses had a way of killing those whom they inspired.

Las musas tenían por costumbre aniquilar a los que inspiraban.

Dogie's surfboards were like works of art. Splashed across their rainbow-colored decks were air-brushed paintings of waterfalls and sea dragons and a host of other fantastic creatures. Her favorite painting was a winged horse that looked like part horse and part comet, with its long tail blazing down the length of the board.

My job as a writer is simple. Write a book I'm proud of, and present it as a gift to the world. Some will love it. Some will hate it. That's the nature of art.

the ignorance of a bigwig who asked if Michelangelo's fresco The Last Judgment was about a trial of Mussolini.

When we were young, we were told that poetry is about voice, about finding a voice and speaking with this voice, but the older I get I think it's not about voice, it's about listening and the art of listening, listening with attention. I don't just mean with the ear; bringing the quality of attention to the world. The writers I like best are those who attend.

Truth is nothing but a lie manipulated into art.

I thought at times that poetry might be an elegant way of screaming.