Quotes About Art

That art had become a poor and pitiable thing. It was no longer inhabited by a deep-rooted soul.

Chartres Cathedral' after Corot, of the 'Fountains of Saint-Cloud' after Hubert Robert, and of 'Vesuvius' after Turner,

Ressaisir notre vie ; et aussi la vie des autres ; car le style, pour l'écrivain aussi bien que pour le peintre, est une question non de technique, mais de vision. Il est la révélation, qui serait impossible par des moyens directs et conscients, de la différence qualitative qu'il y a dans la façon dont nous apparaît le monde, différence qui, s'il n'y avait pas l'art, resterait le secret éternel de chacun.

La vraie vie, [...] c'est la littérature.

such suffering, owed to her, in compensation, the possibility of receiving the strange call which had come to me and which I would never again cease to hear—as it were the promise that something else existed, something perhaps reachable through art, besides the nothingness that I had found in all pleasures, and even in love, and that even if my life seemed so empty, at least it was not over.

The Louvre and all the museums were closed and when one read at the head of an article "Sensational Exhibition" one might be certain it was not an exhibition of pictures but of dresses destined to quicken "those delicate artistic delights of which Parisian women have been too long deprived.

This book of mine has not been manufactured: it has been garnered.

Et voici que le monde(qui n'a pas été créé une fois, mais aussi souvent qu'un artiste original est survenu) nous apparait entièrement différent de l'ancien, mais parfaitement clair.

I said something friendly or even admiring to her. She was like almost all women, who imagine that the compliment they receive is a strict expression of the truth, that it is a judgment passed impartially, irresistibly, as though it applied to an art object unconnected with a particular individual. And so it was with a seriousness that made me blush at my own hypocrisy that she put the vain and artless question customary in such circumstances, "You like it?

La vera terra dei barbari non è quella che non ha mai conosciuto l'arte, ma quella che, disseminata di capolavori, non sa né apprezzarli né conservarli.

Authentic art does not proclaim itself for it is achieved in silence.

Art extracted from the most familiar reality does indeed exist and its domain is perhaps the largest of any.

But, less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

You can make a new version of what you love only by renouncing it.

Although it is rightly said that there can be no progress, no discovery in art, but only in the sciences, and that each artist starting afresh on an individual effort cannot be either helped or hindered therein by the efforts of any other, it must none the less be acknowledged that, in so far as art brings to light certain laws, once an industry has popularized them, the art that was first in the field loses retrospectively a little of its originality.

People said that an age of speed required rapidity in art, precisely as they might have said that the next war could not last longer than a fortnight, or that the coming of railways would kill the little places beloved of the coaches, which the motor-car, for all that, was to restore to favour.

Une œuvre est à la fois le souvenir de nos amours passées et la prophétie de nos amours nouvelles

For when it is in the hope of making a priceless discovery that we desire to receive certain impressions from nature or from works of art, we have qualms lest our soul imbibe inferior impressions which might lead us to form a false estimate of the value of Beauty.

An artist has no need to express his thought directly in a work for the work to reflect its quality; it has even been said that the highest praise of God is to be found in the denial of Him by the atheist, who considers creation to be perfect enough to dispense with a Creator.

When one has fallen in love first with one painter, then with another, one can finally admire the whole museum in a way that is not chilly, for the admiration is made of successive loves, each of which in its time was exclusive, but which have finally coalesced.

This reaction from the disappointment which great works of art cause at first may in fact be attributed to a weakening of the initial impression or to the effort necessary to lay bare the truth—two hypotheses which recur in all important questions, questions about the truth of Art, of Reality, of the Immortality of the Soul; we must choose between them;

not for a triumph of dramatic artistry but for a manifestation of life;

And thinking again of the sameness of Vinteuil's works, I explained to Albertine that the great men of letters have never created more than a single work, or rather have never done more than refract through various media an identical beauty which they bring into the world.

Victor Hugo, ?öyle der: Çimenler uzamal?, çocuklar ölmeli mutlaka. Ben diyorum ki, sanat?n ac?mas?z yasas? uyar?nca, insanlar?n, kendimizin, ?st?rab?n her türünü tatt?ktan sonra ölmesi gerekir ki, unutu?un de?il, ebedî hayat?n çimleri, verimli eserlerin gür otlar? uzas?n, gelecek nesiller ne?e içinde, alt?nda uyuyanlara ald?rmadan gelip "k?rda yemek"lerini yiyebilsinler.