Quotes About Art

Event succeeds event; accidents, people, happenings, one after another come toward us. Each must be met and dealt with. . . . For this process of adjustment is life, and the mastery of it is the art of living. . . . —KARL DE SCHWEINITZ, The Art of Helping People out of Trouble, 1924

when God gave the world the Renaissance artists, He gave us artistic genius the likes of which have not been seen since. Renaissance is a French word with a lovely meaning. It means to be reborn. It is a word with hope infused in every letter. It assures us that what has fallen into pieces can be made whole, what has sagged into ugliness can be made beautiful again, what has died can have life breathed into it once more.

Everything beautiful has a story it

Wabi-sabi" is a Japanese expression for the beauty of impermanence,

A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive in a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang from the printing press -- a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, ...

If only feelings and ideas and stories and history really could be contained in a block of marble—if only there could be a gathering up of permanence—how reassuring it would be, how comforting to think that something you loved could be held in place, moored and everlasting, rather than bobbing along on the slippery sea of reminiscence, where it could always drift out of reach.

A Nigerian librarian told me that her library offers art and entrepreneurship training classes

He was also pensive and neurotic, and suffered from inexplicable aches, unaccountable pains, and pervasive anxiety. He seesawed between bursts of ecstasy, which occurred when he was exposed to great art, and troughs of melancholy. His friends considered him mercurial and poetic. In his spare time, he enjoyed drawing intricate sketches of imaginary cities.

the Chilean psychiatrist and brilliant thinker Claudio Naranjo, said about music, "Only repetition invites spontaneous innovation," and of course this is true of all the arts. You

The link between foreign-exchange transactions, art, and armaments hadn't gone unnoticed by Hoover.

Don't try to get him to "see everything" [at an art museum]. You'll give him pictorial indigestion. One sure way of making a person hate apples is to take him to an orchard at 9:00 a.m. and force feed him apples until noon! Indeed, the revulsion may last a lifetime. So it is with pictures and museums.

On Photography "Photography does not create eternity, as art does; it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption

When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself

So successful has been the camera's role in beautifying the world that photographs, rather than the world, have become the standard of the beautiful.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

The painter constructs, the photographer discloses.

I remember being disappointed when Papa had shown me Caravaggio's Judith. She was completely passive while she was sawing through a man's neck. Caravaggio gave all the feeling to the man. Apparently, he couldn't imagine a woman to have a single thought. I wanted to paint her thoughts, if such a thing were possible -- determination and concentration and belief in the absolute necessity of the act. The fate of her people resting on her shoulders...

He had a thought that amused him. "Figures, still life, landscape, AND an animal! Zola, eat your hat!" he bellowed.

Those Amazing Musical Instruments! Your Guide to the Orchestra Through Sounds and Stories.

Levine, Robert. The Story of the Orchestra: Listen While You Learn About the Instruments, the Music and the Composers Who Wrote the Music!

To be more precise it was the color of heartache.

I want to create, not kill.

To trace the development of mind from earliest times...requires...not a categorical concept, but a functional one.... The most promising operational principle for this purpose is the principle of individuation.[p. 310]" "[yet she also says:]...we have no physical model of this endless rhythm of individuation and involvement, we do have its image in the world of art, most purely in dance;...this dialectic of vital continuity...[p. 355]