Quotes About Art

The loveliest creations of men are persistently painful. What would be the description of happiness?

I have always thought that great artists were those who dared to confer the right of beauty on things so natural that people say on seeing them, Why did I never realize before that that was beautiful too?

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

Just as photography in the past freed painting from its concern for a certain sort of accuracy, so the phonograph will eventually no doubt rid the novel of the kind of dialogue which is drawn from the life and which realists take so much pride in.

Words are traitors, for language tends to impose more logic than there is logic in life, and that the most precious in us is that which remains unexpressed.

In a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, art alone is both subject to time and yet victorious over it.

Ces sculptures-là, l'homme qui les a faites, il aimait ce qu'il faisait. Moi, ici, j'ai toujours été contre ce qui est destruction. Les curés, bien sûr, je ne suis pas d'accord ; les églises, j'ai rien contre. Moi, j'ai mon idée, je trouve qu'on devrait en faire des théâtres : c'est riche, on entend bien....

Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.

The life these words speak of is not worth the ink they are written in.... He now knows that the only words worth writing down arise when language is impossible.

He should have told Vlad that in the old days a collection of poems could change your life, but a single poem could also cost the life of its author.

A poem was a box for your soul. That was the point. It was the place where you could save bits of yourself, and shake out your darkest feelings, without worrying that people would think you were strange. While I was writing, I would forget myself and everyone else; poetry made me feel part of something noble and beautiful and bigger than me.

quante, sta 'sti piviri miserabili, erano pirsone capaci di arricchiri il munno con la loro arti? quanti tra i tanti cataferi che oramà erano nell'invisibili cimitero marino sarebbiro stati capaci di scriviri 'na poesia le cui parole avrebbiro consolato, ralligrato, inchiuto il cori di chi stava a liggirla?»

In art, [Tolstoy] articulates with almost prophetic brilliance the elements that combine to make and keep women inferior, all of them originating, in his view, in sexual intercourse, because sexual intercourse requires objectification and therefore is exploitation. In life, he blamed and hated Sophie [his wife], feeling antagonism and repulsion, because he wanted to fuck her and did fuck her.

My fiction is not autobiography. I am not an exhibitionist. I do not show myself. I am not asking for forgiveness. I do not want to confess. But I have used everything I know—my life—to show what I believe must be shown so that it can be faced. The imperative at the heart of my writing—what must be done—comes directly from my life. But I do not show my life directly, in full view; nor even look at it while others watch.

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

A poet is someone who can use a single image to send a universal message.

Perhaps cinema is the most personal art, the most intimate. In cinema only the author's intimate truth will be convincing enough for the audience to accept.

One doesn't need a lot to be able to live. The great thing is to be free in your work. Ofcourse it's important to print or exhibit, but if that's not possible you are still left with the most important thing of all -- being able to work without asking anybody's permission.

All that I wanted was to tempt into life things that wanted to come out of me.

Art affirms all that is best in man—hope, faith, love, beauty, prayer…What he dreams of and what he hopes for…What is art?…Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life—love and sacrifice.

Artistic creation, after all, is not subject to absolute laws, valid from age to age; since it is related to the more general aim of mastery of the world, it has an infinite number of facets, the vincula that connect man with his vital activity; and even if the path towards knowledge is unending, no step that takes man nearer to a full understanding of the meaning of his existence can be too small to count.

No other art can compare with cinema in the force, precision, and starkness with which it conveys awareness of facts and aesthetic structures existing and changing within time.

Cinema is a very difficult and serious art, it requires sacrificing of yourself. You should belong to it, it shouldn't belong to you. Cinema uses your life, not vice versa.