Quotes About Art

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.

Look, look!" cried the Tree, "the rose is finished now;" but the Nightingale made no answer, for she was lying dead in the long grass, with the thorn in her heart.

I turned halfway round, and saw Dorian Gray for the first time. 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 someone whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.

Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but molds it to its purpose.

The more the public is interested in artists, the less it is interested in art. The personality of the artist is not a thing the public should know about. It is too accidental.

All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.

Art persists, it timelessly continues.

The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture or its music.

Nature is no great mother who has home us. She is our own creation. It is in our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see and how we see it depends on the arts that have influenced us. To look at a thing is very different from seeing a thing. One does not see anything until one sees its beauty.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

There was blood on the painted feet, as though the thing had dripped--blood even on the hand that had not held the knife.

I have simply worshipped pianists - two at a time, sometimes, Harry tells me. I don't know what it is about them. Perhaps it is that they are foreigners. They all are, ain't they? Even those that are born in England become foreigners after a time, don't they? It is so clever of them, and such a compliment to art.

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame. It will be to each man what he is himself. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.  Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid.

Pero, ¿y el retrato? ¿Qué iba a decir del retrato? El lienzo de Basil Hallward contenía el secreto de su vida, narraba su historia. Le había enseñado a amar su propia belleza. ¿Le enseñaría también a aborrecer su propia alma? ¿Volvería alguna vez a mirarlo?

The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grandperes ont toujours tort.

Moral grounds are always the last refuge of people who have no sense of beauty.

Detrás de toda hermosura hay algo trágico

No Artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

Le donne ci ispirano il desiderio di far dei capolavori e ci impediscono sempre di eseguirli

The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world... They live as we all should live—undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet... Your rank and wealth, Harry; my brains, such as they are—my art, whatever it may be worth; Dorian Gray's good looks—we shall all suffer for what the gods have given us, suffer terribly.