Quotes About Art

Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies.

The greater the length, the more beautiful will the piece be by reason of its size, provided that the whole be perspicuous.

Dancing imitates character, emotion, and action, by rhythmical movement.

Abstract accuracy is no more to be expected in all philosophic treatises than in all products of art, and noble and just acts with which the art political is concerned admit of such great variation and of so many differences that they have been held to depend upon conventional rather than upon real distinctions.

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

If purpose, then, is inherent in art, so is it in Nature also. The best illustration is the case of a man being his own physician, for Nature is like that—agent and patient at once.

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

El arte, lo mismo que el misticismo, concluyen por alterar nuestro desenvolvimiento orgánico.

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

When I travel, I draw and paint sketches which is great fun. And as long as you are fully aware that it has nothing to do with actual art, I think that's all right.

If architecture had nothing to do with art, it would be astonishingly easy to build houses, but the architect's task - his most difficult task - is always that of selecting.

art is risk made visible

You see, for me [art]'s not one of life's ornaments, rococo relaxation to be greeted affably after a day of hard work; I'm inverted on this : for me it's my very breath, the one thing necessary, and all else is excretion and a latrine.

Die Welt der Kunst & Fantasie ist die wahre, the rest is a nightmare.

Farbenblindheit ist selten; Kunstblindheit die Regel!

It's quite clear : an outsider can , on principle, only value foreign literature that translates well; the truly great artists of language and the fecund experimenters are inaccessible to him; are usually unknown to him in fact !

Poet: should you receive the applause of the people, ask yourself: what have I done wrong? ! And if your second book is so received as well, then cast away your pen: you can never be great. […] Art for the people? ! : leave that slogan to the Nazis and Communists: it's just the opposite: the people (everyman!) are obligated to struggle their way to art!

Die Welt der Kunst und Fantasie ist die einzig wahre. The rest is a nightmare!

Die Welt der Kunst & Fantasie ist die einzig wahre. The rest is a nightmare!

Postmodernism shifts the basis of the work of art from the object to the transaction between the spectator and the object and further deconstructs this by negating the presence of a representative objective viewer.

The price of poetry is life.

The expression of personality in art had been sought after and appreciated long before anyone had realized that art was based no longer on an objective What but on a subjective How. Long after it had become a self-confession, people still continued to talk about the objective truth in art, although it was precisely the self-expressionism in art which enabled it to win through to general recognition.