Quotes About Art

all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics, the need for perspective and for error...

Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.

That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen.

Close the Bible and open the Manu Smriti. It has an affirmation of life, a triumphing agreeable sensation in life and that to draw up a lawbook such as Manu means to permit oneself to get the upper hand, to become perfection, to be ambitious of the highest art of living.

In truth, nothing could be more opposed to the purely aesthetic interpretation and justification of the world which are taught in this book than the Christian teaching, which is, and wants to be, only moral and which relegates art, every art, to the realm of lies ; with its absolute standards, beginning with the truthfulness of God, it negates, judges, and damns art.

Write with blood, and you will find that blood is spirit.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

The voice of the Socratic dream vision is the only sign of any misgivings about the limits of logic: Perhaps – thus he might have asked himself – what is not intelligible to me is not necessarily unintelligent? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science?

I do not know how to make a distinction between tears and music

To stay cheerful when involved in a gloomy and exceedingly responsible business is no inconsiderable art: yet what could be more necessary than cheerfulness? Nothing succeeds in which high spirits play no part. Only excess of strength is proof of strength.

God has given us music so that firstly we are lead towards higher things. Music combines all characteristics in it. It can elevate, it can tease, it can cheer us up, yes, it can even break the most brazen temperament with its tender and yearning sounds. However, its main aim is to direct our thinking towards higher things, to elevate and even deeply disturb us…

No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day. Ten times a day must thou overcome thyself: that causeth wholesome weariness, and is poppy to the soul. Ten times must thou reconcile again with thyself; for overcoming is bitterness, and badly sleep the unreconciled. Ten truths must thou find during the day; otherwise wilt thou seek truth during the night, and thy soul will have been hungry.

Most books are born from the smoke and vapour of the brain: and to vapour and smoke may they well return. For having no fire within themselves, they shall be visited with fire.

From the beginning, nothing has been more alien, repugnant, and hostile to woman than truth -- her great art is the lie, her highest concern is mere appearance of beauty.

Even now it is ceasing to be art of the nobleman, and it is quite possible that some day one may find it so common and even vulgar that, along with all party literature and journalism, one would classify it as prostitution of the spirit.

the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon.

Art as the single superior counter-force against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-Christian, anti-Buddhist, anti-Nihilist par excellence.

Debemos guardarnos de la confusión en que por contiguity [contiguidad] psicológica, para decirlo igual que los ingleses, muy fácilmente cae un artista: la de creer que él mismo es aquello que él puede representar, concebir, expresar. En realidad ocurre que, si él lo fuera, no lo podría en absoluto representar, concebir, expresar.

These trumpeters of reality are bad musicians.

When I seek another word for 'music', I never find any other word than 'Venice'.

To give style to one's character—that is a grand and rare art! He who surveys all that his nature presents in its strength and in its weakness, and then fashions it into an ingenious plan, until everything appears artistic and rational, and even the weaknesses enchant the eye..exercises that admirable art.

That the artist places a higher value on appearance than on reality constitutes no objection to this proposition. For 'appearance' here signifies reality once more, only selected, strengthened, corrected.… The tragic artist is not a pessimist – it is precisely he who affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is Dionysian…

Where we encounter the naïve in art, we should recognize the highest effect of Apollinian culture--which always must first overthrow an empire of Titans and slay monsters, and which must have triumphed over an abysmal and terrifying view of the world and the keenest susceptibility to suffering through recourse to the most forceful and pleasurable illusions.

Bad men have no songs'.* – How is it the Russians have songs?