Quotes About Art

Writing is learning to say nothing, more cleverly each day.

I am entirely convinced that the drama renounces its chief privilege and glory when it waives its claim to be a popular art, and is content to address itself to coteries, however "high-browed."

One thing, however, we may say with tolerable confidence: whatever may be the germ of a play--whether it be an anecdote, a situation, or what not--the play will be of small account as a work of art unless character, at a very early point, enters into and conditions its development. The story which is independent of character--which can be carried through by a given number of ready-made puppets--is essentially a trivial thing.

People fail to realize the technical conditions of drama, and think that, in the case of so simple a matter as playwriting, everyone is as good a judge as his neighbor. With regard to music and painting, you will hear people modestly confess that they have no expert knowledge, though "they know what they like." With regard to drama, they are troubled with no such diffidence. They not only know what they like, but they know what you ought to like, and more especially what you ought to despise.

According to Epictetus, the primary concern of philosophy should be the art of living: Just as wood is the medium of the carpenter and bronze is the medium of the sculptor, your life is the medium on which you practice the art of living.

Number of Open Mics (NOM)

Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

I warn you against believing that advertising is a science.

In his terrific book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman wrote that the best approach to a good scene is to leave out the beginning and the end (the parts readers can readily guess or that matter least)

Harmony of colouring is destructive of artÖ it is like the smile of a fool.

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars. General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer; For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particles.

Art can never exist without Naked beauty display'd.

The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.

Poetry fettered fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed, or flourish, in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish!

To me this world is all one continued vision of fancy or imagination, and I feel flattered when I am told so. What is it sets Homer, Virgil and Milton in so high a rank of art? Why is the Bible more entertaining and instructive than any other book? Is it not because they are addressed to the imagination, which is spiritual sensation, and but immediately to the understanding or reason?

None can imitate life without the intermediary of art.

Landscape is metaphor / and only metaphor. But, oh, I have loved it so.

A green world, a scene of green, deep / with light blues, the greens made deep / by those blues. One thinks how / in certain pictures, envied landscapes are seen / (through a window, maybe) far behind the serene / sitter's face, the serene pose, as though/in some impossible mirror, face to back, / human serenity gazed at a green world / which gazed at this face.

Beauty is the vocation of the earth.

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. Albert

Speech after long silence; it is right,All other lovers being estranged or dead…That we descant and yet again descantUpon the supreme theme of Art and Song:Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; youngWe loved each other and were ignorant.

Everything that man esteemsEndures a moment or a day.Love's pleasure drives his love away,The painter's brush consumes his dreams.

Players and painted stage took all my love,And not those things that they were emblems of.

Who can tell the dancer from the dance?