Quotes About Art

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us...it is outside the proper sphere of art.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. 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.

There is such a thing as robbing a story of its reality by trying to make it too true...

I remember saying once to André Gide, as we sat together in some Paris café, that while meta-physics had but little real interest for me, and morality absolutely none, there was nothing that either Plato or Christ had said that could not be transferred immediately into the sphere of Art and there find its complete fulfilment.

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

You have crushed the grapes against your palate. Nothing has been hidden from you. And it has all been to you no more than the sound of music. It has not marred you.

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

We have been able to have fine poetry in England because the public do not read it, and consequently do not influence it. 

I had been foolish in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good looking, and that I could paint.

Like the painting of a sorrow, A face without a heart.

The studio was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst

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.

No artist has ethical sympathies.

Conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.

now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid, jade-faced painters of Tokyo who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.

As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there.

Psychology is in its infancy, as a science. I hope, in the interests of Art, it will always remain so.

No existen libros morales o inmorales. Los libros están bien o mal escritos. Eso es todo.

Art and art only, can make archaeology beautiful; and the theatric art can use it most directly and most vividly, for it can combine in one exquisite presentation the illusion of actual life with the wonder of the unreal world.

We look to the archaeologist for the materials, to the artist for the method.

a beleza, a verdadeira beleza, acaba onde a expressão intelectual começa. O intelecto é já uma forma de exagero e destrói a harmonia de qualquer rosto.

Yesterday evening Mrs Arundel insisted on my going to the window, and looking at the glorious sky, as she called it. Of course I had to look at it. She is one of those absurdly pretty Philistines to whom one can deny nothing. And what was it? It was simply a very second-rate Turner, a Turner of a bad period, with all the painter's worst faults exaggerated and over-emphasized.

É o espectador, e não a vida, que a arte, na verdade, espelha.

Art is rarely intelligible to the criminal classes.