Quotes About Art

What, child, your husband shuts himself into a room with naked women! And you are so simple as to believe that he draws them?

For the last thirty years, however, these pictures of ancient times are beginning to fade and disappear. Modern industry, working for the masses, goes on destroying the creations of ancient art, the works of which were once as personal to the consumer as to the artisan. Nowadays we have products, we no longer have works.

opinions do not give talent, they always spoil what talent there is; and the poor fellow whom you have just seen is a proof thereof. An artist's opinion ought to be: Faith in his art, in his work; and his only way of success is toil when nature has given him the sacred fire.

To Sofka "Have you observed, mademoiselle, that the painters and sculptors of the Middle Ages, when they placed two figures in adoration, one on each side of a fair Saint, never failed to give them a family likeness? When you here see your name among those that are dear to me, and under whose auspices I place my works, remember that touching harmony, and you will see in this not so much an act of homage as an expression of the brotherly affection of your devoted servant, "DE BALZAC.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

The purpose of art is not to copy nature, but to express it. It's not about making good or bad copies, it's about poetry!

Otherwise a sculptor could save himself the trouble and take a cast of a woman! And yet, try making a cast of your mistress's hand and

Los hombres que tienen tantas cosas que expresar en bellas obras soñadas durante mucho tiempo sienten cierto desprecio por la conversación, trato en el que el espíritu se rebaja al degradarse.

Art can go no further than this. Art has risen above Nature, since Nature only gives her creatures a few brief years of life.

There are two kinds of poets: those who feel and those who express themselves. The former are happier.

finding that art is long and life is short — ars longa et vita brevis — did not commit the mistake of wasting their time and lessening their powers of creation by silly and insipid intrigues.

Such 'rubbish,' dear child," he resumed, "is frequently all that remains of vanished civilizations. An Etruscan jar, and a necklace, which sometimes fetch forty and fifty thousand francs, is 'rubbish' which reveals the perfection of art at the time of the siege of Troy, proving that the Etruscans were Trojan refugees in Italy.

La hardiesse du vrai s'élève à des combinaisons interdites à l'art, tant elles sont invraisemblables ou peu décentes, à moins que l'écrivain ne les adoucisse, ne les émonde, ne les châtre.

Il genio è pazienza, come ha detto Buffon. La pazienza è in effetti ciò che, nell'uomo, somiglia di più ai procedimenti che segue la natura quando crea. Che cos'è l'arte, signore? è la natura concentrata.»

Passion is univeral humanity. Without it religion history art and romance would be useless.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

if reason and poesy persist in wrangling with the tools, the brushes, we shall be brought to doubt, like Frenhofer, who is as much excited in brain as he is exalted in art. A sublime painter, indeed; but he had the misfortune to be born rich, and that enables him to stray into theory and conjecture. Do not imitate him. Work! work! painters should theorize with their brushes in their hands.

On the one hand, he beheld a vision of social life in is most charming and refined forms, of quick-pulsed youth, of fair, impassioned faces invested with all the charm of poetry, framed in a marvelous setting of luxury or art; and, on the other hand, he saw a somber picture of degradation, in which passion was extinct and nothing was left but the cords and pulleys and bare mechanism.

For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the "values," with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting?

as does the statue in the marble, in the hard, resisting material of life itself

You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists.

No man ever reached to excellence in any one art or profession without having passed through the slow and painful process of study and preparation

No poems can please for long or live that are written by water-drinkers.