Quotes About Art

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

We all have music inside us, and can learn how to get it out, one way or another.

To be an architect is to possess an individual voice speaking a generally understood language of form.

Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.

Good architecture is like a piece of beautifully composed music crystallized in space that elevates our spirits beyond the limitation of time.

I saw the bathroom fixtures as a kind of American Trinity.

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

The flowering of geometry.

I call architecture 'petrified music'.

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest of all the arts.

I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.

Pioneers did not produce original works of art, because they were creating original human environments; they did not imagine Utopias because they were shaping them.

Culture is something you cannot buy, something you cannot import, something you cannot learn or produce at will. A writer, an artist or musician cannot sit down and say 'Now I will produce culture.' Culture is something that evolves out of the simple, enduring elements of everyday life; elements most truthfully expressed in the folk arts and crafts of a nation.

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

The pen is the tongue of the mind.

Something wonderful and strange that the artist fashions out of the chaos of the world in the torment of his soul.

The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.

I am a deeply superficial person.

Colors speak all languages.

Conversation is the fine art of mutual consideration and communication about matters of common interest that basically have some human importance.

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

The highest courage is not to be found in the instinctive acts of men who risk their lives to save a friend or slay a foe; the physical fearlessness of a moment or an hour is not to be compared with immolation of months or years for the sake of wisdom or art.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.