Quotes About Art

The artist gives the beholder increasingly 'more to do,' he draws him into the magic circle of creation and allows him to experience something of the thrill of 'making' which had once been the privilege of the artist

I have tried to tell the Story of Art as the story of a continuous weaving and challenging of traditions in which each work refers to the past and points to the future. For there is no aspect of this story more wonderful than this-- that a living chain of tradition still links the art of our own days with that of the Pyramid age.

One Egyptian word for sculptor was actually 'He-who-keeps-alive.

He spread his paint on canvas-here light, there dark-till it looked like a streaked agate stone, and then "with little trouble," he made a finished painting emerge surprisingly out of the chaos of mixed paint.

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.

Refinement is the sign of deficient vitality, in art, in love, and in everything.

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.

A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.

She had a strong, if erroneous, conviction of her own futility, and wished she had never come out of her backwater, where nothing happened except art and literature, and where no one ever got married or succeeded in remaining engaged.

The Arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken. Something as mysterious and capricious as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act.

It will be generally admitted that Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man.

Yet complicated people were getting wet - not only the shepherds. For instance, the piano-tuner was sopping. So was the vicar's wife. So were the lieutenant and the peevish damsels in his Battlesden car. Gallantry, charity, and art pursued their various missions, perspiring and muddy, while out on the slopes beyond them stood the eternal man and the eternal dog, guarding eternal sheep until the world is vegetarian.

I had no right to move out of my books and music, which was what I did when I met you

The hedge was a half-painted picture which would be finished in a few days.

The melody rose, unprofitably magical. It broke; it was resumed broken, not marching once from the cradle to the grave. The sadness of the incomplete—the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art—throbbed in its disjected phrases, and made the nerves of the audience throb. Not thus had she played on the little draped piano at the Bertolini, and "Too much Schumann" was not the remark that Mr. Beebe had passed to himself when she returned.

A matter neither sensual nor sensational is ignored by the art of today.

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

She was like a woman of Leonardo da Vinci's, whom we love not so much for herself as for the things that she will not tell us.

All of us, even the sophisticated, yearn for permanence, and to the unsophisticated permanence is the chief excuse for a work of art.

All heroic endeavour, and all that is known as art, assumes that there is such a background, just as all practical endeavour, when the world is to our taste, assumes that the world is all.

Look at that picture, for instance. I love it because, like the painter himself, I love the subject. I don't judge it with eyes of the normal man. There seem two roads for arriving at Beauty—one is in common, and all the world has reached Michelangelo by it, but the other is private to me and a few more.

Gallantry, charity, and art pursued their various missions, perspiring and muddy, while out on the slopes beyond them stood the eternal man and the eternal dog, guarding eternal sheep until the world is vegetarian.

There was no one even to tell her which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised by Mr. Ruskin.

O escritor americano Philip Roth, falecido neste maio de 2018, insistia que a literatura não é o "concurso de beleza moral" em que hoje se tenta transformá-la a golpes de politicamente correto, inclusão social e análogos.