Quotes About Art

Lanny enjoyed this season of mist and mellow fruitfulness, and observed with the eyes of an art connoisseur the thatched cottages and moldy-looking roofs, the hedges, the winding roads

That is what art is, a process of creation, which makes itself a part of life, and builds new life in its own image, immortal and eternally operating within the soul of man. One accent of the Holy Ghost the heedless world hath never lost!

solemnly ordain: "There shall be no reprisals." That was the pattern of this new society, as Lanny came to know it; boundless cruelty combined with bland and pious lying. The Fascisti would develop falsehood into a new science and a new art; they would teach it to one dictator after another, until half the human race would no longer have any means of telling truth from falsehood.

The ascetics give it a bad name," he said, "but the fact is that it is one of the most delicate and gracious of the arts, and its delights penetrate every fiber of the being and become the basis of sympathy and understanding, companionship and co-operation, loyalty and devotion. Love is like the fire under the boilers, which gives power to all the machinery. Without it, life is a film in black and white; with it, the picture glows with all the colors of the rainbow.

Various persons had decided to burn churches and church buildings in Spain, as a means of putting an end to the use of religion in support of political reaction and industrial slavery. Lanny was sorry, because to him these old churches were sanctuaries of art and of such culture as had existed in their day.

They were told about the house, which had been designed by the man whom advanced and art-loving Americans considered the greatest architect of the time; the roof was so built that water didn't always run off it, and the chimneys smoked, and the kitchen was inconveniently placed—but it was one of the most original and beautiful of designs, and everybody wanted to come and see it.

For Lanny's then stepfather had been not merely a painter, but a student and thinker. When he painted the ancient ruins of Greece and Rome he tried to make you feel the sorrow of great things vanished forever. When he painted a Greek shepherd in his rags or a Biskra water carrier in his gray burnoose, Marcel was not just getting something exotic and unusual; he had a heart full of pity for lonely men who lived hard lives and did not understand the forces which dominated them.

One might look at a Rembrandt picture, or hear a Beethoven symphony, without depriving others of the privilege; but one couldn't become an oil king without taking oil away from others.

A strange plight for art lovers, who trained themselves to be receptive and then didn't dare use their faculties except upon imaginary things! Divide your mind in half, and build an emotion-tight compartment between the two; be sensitive to art and insensitive to life; learn to follow the example of that Russian countess who wept for the woes of the tenor in the opera while her coachman froze to death on the box outside!

It is in Paris that the beating of Europe's heart is felt. Paris is the city of cities.

Art is always an exchange, like love, whose giving and taking can be a complex and wounding matter, according to Michelangelo. Ali Smith, Artful

It is clear, for example, that many Americans did not like the idea of avant-garde art, especially in relation to women's fashion. Many people were particularly indignant about what seemed to them the deliberate obliteration of sexual attractiveness, which they identified with the tightwaisted dress and the hourglass figure.

The grey hair, which has spoken of old age at once to writers and doctors, means to a painter not just grey hair, but a certain grey – perhaps a grey with silver lights and warm shadows, perhaps an opaque cold grey, but a grey as different from other greys as one chord in music is different from others.

Perfect worlds do not exist. There are only the funny, strange, weeping, singing, truncated, and imperfect universes created by the gods of paintbrush and musical instruments, the gods who infuse their creations with their own blood, their own soul. When he looks at these worlds, the true Lord of Hosts, the creator of the universe, probably cannot help but smile mockingly

for Cixous, writing from the imaginary implies the invention of "other I's," the poet is more open to otherness. She follows the post-revolutionary myth of the artist as subversive and effeminate. Poetry, like other arts, questions and transforms ideology. … This is not to say that to create, one must be homosexual, but that there is no invention without other I's, no poetry, no fiction without that of a certain homosexuality, therefore of bisexuality.

Los verdaderos poemas son incendios.

La poesía soy yo.

Os diré qué entiendo por poema creado. Es un poema en el que cada parte constitutiva, y todo el conjunto, muestran un hecho nuevo, independiente del mundo externo, desligado de cualquiera otra realidad que no sea la propia, pues toma su puesto en el mundo como un fenómeno singular, aparte y distinto de los demás fenómenos.

Un poeta debe decir aquellas cosas que nunca se dirían sin él.

It's not visual. He's not. You know him by his work, for one thing, and that part is visual, I suppose, isn't it? The sky, moon, stars, and trees, all those exotic colors you're apt to see in birds' feathers. When you look at a painting, you don't try to visualize the artist, do you? But you know somebody painted it or it wouldn't be there.

tragedy, comedy, and the Parthenon were not so much expressions of native genius as reflections of lots of money.

His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.

Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

God manifests himself to us in the first degree through the life of the universe, and in the second degree through the thought of man. The second manifestation is not less holy than the first. The first is named Nature, the second is named Art.