Quotes About Art

Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.

As pessoas comuns costumavam esperar para que a vida lhes exibisse os próprios segredos; para a minoria, porém, para os eleitos, os mistérios da vida eram revelados antes mesmo que o véu fosse afastado, efeito, muitas vezes, da arte, especialmente da literatura, que lida, direto, com as paixões e o intelecto.

art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all. The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass. The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium

I have grown sick of shadows. You are more to me than all art can ever be.

Only the great masters of style ever succeed in being obscure.

Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these, there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty.

To have ruined one's self over poetry is an honour.

It is not good for one's morals to see bad acting.

Behind every exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic. Worlds

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity

At every single moment of one's life one is what one is going to be no less than what one has been. Art is a symbol, because man is a symbol.

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.

Creo que el arte oculta al artista más que lo descubre

Upon the walls of the lonely locked room where he had spent so much of his boyhood, he had hung with his own hands the terrible portrait whose changing features showed him the real degradation of his life, and in front of it had draped the purple-and-gold pall as a curtain.

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Comprendí que estaba ante alguien cuya simple personalidad era tan fascinante que, si me abandonaba a ella, absorbería mi naturaleza entera, mi alma y hasta mi propio arte.

Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art. Besides, each time that one loves is the only time one has ever loved. Difference of object does not alter singleness of passion. It merely intensifies it. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible.

Still, I am conscious now that behind all this beauty, satisfying though it may be, there is some spirit hidden of which the painted forms and shapes are but modes of manifestation, and it is with this spirit that I desire to become in harmony. I have grown tired of the articulate utterances of men and things.

Truth in Art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit.

If you wish me to never look at your picture again, I am content. I have always you to look at. If you wish the best work I have ever done to be hidden from the world, I am satisfied. Your friendship is dearer to me than any fame or reputation.

Expression is as necessary to me as leaf and blossoms are to the black branches of the trees that show themselves above the prison walls and are so restless in the wind. Between my art and the world there is now a wide gulf, but between art and myself there is none. I hope at least that there is none.

Cupids laughed round it as of old.

Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill anymore than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus.