Quotes About Art

If one plays good music, people don't listen, and if one plays bad music people don't talk.

Now produce your explanation and pray make it improbable.

I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day—mock me horribly!

Art only begins where Imitation ends.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

It's the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Now art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages, perhaps.

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

Love is not fashionable anymore; the poets have killed it.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

Art finds her own perfection within, and not outside of, herself. She is not to be judged by any external standard of resemblance.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

Bad artists always admire each others work.

Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

There were moments when he looked on evil simply as a mode through which he could realize his conception of the beautiful.

What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Harry, said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

tone of colour in a room or a morning sky, a particular perfume that you had once loved and that brings subtle memories with it, a line from a forgotten poem that you had come across again, a cadence from a piece of music that you had ceased to play— I tell you, Dorian, that it is on things like these that our lives depend.

Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty. Then, and then only, does it comes into existence.

What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals.