Quotes About Art

The purpose of art is to console and amuse—myself, and, I hope, others.

In art it is hard to say anything as good as saying nothing.

Music conveys to us itself!

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics. The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside. In such a way that they have the whole world as background.

We regard the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without color and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry.

A picture of a complete apple tree, however accurate, is in a certain sense much less like the tree itself than is a little daisy.

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis [i.e., under the aspect of eternity]; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connexion between art and ethics.

2.22 What a picture represents it represents independently of its truth or falsity, by means of its pictorial form.

Either my piece is a work of the highest rank, or it is not a work of the highest rank. In the latter (and more probable) case I myself am in favour of it not being printed. And in the former case it's a matter of indifference whether it's printed twenty or a hundred years sooner or later. After all, who asks whether the Critique of Pure Reason, for example, was written in 17x or y.

The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.

In the sense, that is, that the author who created us alive no longer wished, or was no longer able, materially to put us into a work of art. And this was a real crime, sir; because he who has had the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. He cannot die. The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die. And to live for ever, it does not need to have extraordinary gifts or to be able to work wonders.

Whoever understands the game of life can no longer fool himself, but if you cannot fool yourself, you can no longer derive any pleasure or enjoyment from life. And so it goes, my work is full of compassion, bitter compassion for all those who fool themselves. But this compassion cannot help but be followed by ferocious derision of a destiny that condemns man to deception. And this succinctly is the reason for the bitterness of my art, and also my life.

A má literatura é a literatura em estado puro, intocada por distrações como estilo, invenção, graça ou significado, reduzida apenas ao ímpeto de escrever.

Minha musa inspiradora é o meu prazo de entrega.

Uma poesia não é feita de palavras. A poesia já existe. A gente só põe as palavras em volta para ela aparecer.

She never understood why painters made ugly things. A, who wanted them in their house? This guy, obviously . . . who had no taste, or anyway was stuck in the nineties. And 2, it seemed like showing off. Like, hey, this is ugly! In your face. People were rude and called it art.

The anthology was not a best-seller; art as a weapon seldom is.

A work of art is a prophetic loan, drawn on fugitive premises; the artist acts on it, and, presumably, sustains some faith that others will do so too, or at least could.

The work of art offers an experience of contradictions and incommensurabilities – these are much better than truths.

But daily life and art occupy different space-times; a museum, a concert hall, a page of text, an art gallery are more likely to be experienced as refuges from daily life than as its venue.

One by one most kids I knew quit drawing and never drew again. It left behind too much evidence.

but paper and ink have conjuring abilities of their own. arrangements of lines and shapes, of letters and words on a series of pages make a world we can dwell and travel in.