Quotes About Art

Flaubert was right when he said that our use of language is like a cracked kettle on which we bang out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we need to move the very stars to pity.

the first rule—he calls it the rule of rules—is the art of challenging what is appealing.

It's important to be able to recognise and seize crux moments when they do appear, but much of the time one is faced with quotidian tasks and routines. There's an art and a science to these things; the art consists in trying to improvise more inventive means of breaking a silence and the science consists in trying to make the periods of silence bearable.

The great cultural project... may very well be to rescue what we have of the art and aesthetic of religion while discarding the supernatural.

The highest art in low politics is to be able to induce the masses to invest their own sense of dignity in yours. Then, if you are exposed as a fraud, they will be exposed as credulous: a conclusion they approach with a natural human reluctance.

temos arte e achamos que os sérios dilemas éticos são mais bem abordados por Shakespeare, Tolstoi, Schiller, Dostoievski e George Eliot do que pelas histórias morais míticas dos livros sagrados.

I put my genius into my life, not into my art.

I'm afraid, ha, ha, I find more inspiration in the Marquis de Sade.

Sometimes Arthur talked about his childhood. As a boy he was delicate and had never been sent to school. An only son, he lived alone with his widowed mother, whom me adored. Together they studied literature and art; together they visted Paris, Baden-Baden, Rome, moving always in the best society, from Schloss to château, from château to palace, gentle, charming, appreciative; in a state of perpeutal tender anxiety about each other's health.

It was as crude as his drafts always were. But it accomplished the enormous feat of making this shapeless blob of potential material emerge 'out of the everywhere into here.

All the poetry in the world is in that face.

It is well known that great art, great music and great literature can emerge out of great pain. This does not lessen the reality of the suffering of the artist, composer or writer, but it points to something creative and redemptive in the human person, made in the image of God, which can bring forth a thing of beauty in the midst of surrounding ugliness, brutality and evil. Nowhere is this more true than in the book of Lamentations.

And 'tis a pretty toy to be a poet.

Things senseless live by art, and rational die By rude contempt of art and industry.

Words, words, words, a million million words circle in my head like hawks, waiting to dive onto the page to rend and tear the only two words I want to write. Why me?

Love them all, said Renoir. That is the secret, young man. Love them all. The painter let go of his arm and shrugged. Then, even if your paintings are shit, you will have loved them all.

The Painting is not shit,' said Lucien. 'I know,' said Henri. 'That was just part of the subterfuge. I am of royal lineage; subterfuge is one of the many talents we carry in our blood, along with guile and hemophilia.

The medium obscured the message.

Why write a song when no one can play the notes or understand the lyrics?

I like a girl with a substantial bottom,' said Renoir, drawing in the air the size bottom he preferred.

I'm painting moments. Unrepeatable, singular moments of light.

I like big butts," Renoir explained to Toulouse-Lautrec.

An artist can't let madness stop him from making art, he simply has to channel it.

I would paint more farms, said Toulouse-Lautrec, but they always put them so far from the bar.