Quotes About Art

I struggled with a nebulous work which seemed now a nouvelle , now a vast novel, wherein a hero not unlike myself pursued, amid ghostly incidents, a series of reflections about life and art.

Give yourself to these great works of art. They suffice for a lifetime.

Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.

So art becomes not communication but mystification.

Bradley, I wish I'd understood that stuff you spouted about Hamlet. Forget it. No high theory about Shakespeare is any good, not because he's so divine but because he's so human. Even great art is jumble in the end. So the critics are just stupid? It needs no theory to tell us this! One should simply try to like as much as one can.

Lucas continued, speaking pensively in a dreamy tone, The painters, you know, the painters, what they did for Christianity!

Prose literature can reveal an aspect of the world which no other art can reveal … and in the case of the novel, the most important thing to be thus revealed, not necessarily the only thing, but incomparably the most important thing, is that other people exist.

However life, unlike art, has an irritating way of bumping and limping on, undoing conversions, casting doubt on solutions, and generally illustrating the impossibility of living happily or virtuously ever after;

All art deals with the absurd and aims at the simple. Good art speaks truth, indeed is truth, perhaps the only truth.

The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and form in art is properly the simulation of the self-contained aimlessness of the universe.

Perhaps the reality is in the suffering. But it can't be. Love promises happiness. Art promises happiness. Yet it isn't exactly a promise . . .

But the poem was a Liebestod and although art cannot but console for what it weeps over, the completion of the poem left him sour and sick and utterly convinced of the henceforward impossibility of love.

Suppose she never got into art school, suppose she was not a painter after all? Suppose the talents which others had persuaded her she possessed were to abandon her overnight, or turn out to have been unreal all the time? Suppose she had to take a typing course or live with a word processor? I would die, she thought, I would kill myself or make myself die of grief. Already there was one great deep grief in her life.

Over the bed hung the picture of her beloved, the Polish Rider. He was looking, with his authoritative pensive mouth and his calm wide-apart eyes, past Moy, over her left shoulder and away into some vast distance. He was a knight upon a quest. He was brave, innocent, chaste, good.

Only art explains, and that cannot itself be explained.

Death drives away what rules everywhere else, the aesthetic.

Izgubiti nekoga ne zna?i izgubiti samo osobu nego i sve one na?ine i oblike kroz koje se ta osoba izražavala; zato ?ovjek izgubivši voljenu osobu može odjednom otkriti da je izgubio i mnoštvo stvari, slika, stihova, pjesama i mjesta.

How little perhaps can words convey except in the hands of a genius.

The painter copies this bed from one point of view. He is thus at three removes from reality. He does not understand the bed, he does not measure it, he could not make it.

Art both expresses and gratifies the lowest part of the soul, and feeds and enlivens base emotions which ought to be left to wither.

The painter and the writer are not just copyists or even illusionists, but through some deeper vision of their subject-matter may become privileged truth tellers.

Like Proust I want to escape from the eternal push and rattle of time into the coolness and poise of a work of art. (Agreeing with Huxley for once, I think it is not what one has experienced, but what one does with what one has experienced that matters. The only possible doctrine of course for one who has experienced remarkably little of the big world!)

Singing is of course a form of aggression.

She dreamt she saw the Polish Rider passing slowly by and he was weeping and she called out to him, but he turned his head away. She dreamt that she was drowning in the pool of tears.