Quotes About Art

Fiona Apple's album made me more immediately depressed than any other music I remembered hearing.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

The special was a tomato salad with bacon, basil, and blue cheese. It was a work of art. Fiona had found a rainbow of heirloom tomatoes- red, orange, yellow, green, purple, yellow with green stripes- and she stacked them on the plate in a tower as colorful as children's blocks.

The icicles wreathing On trees in festoon Swing, swayed to our breathing: They're made of the moon.

Poetry is that which is worth translating. The poem dies when it has no place to go.

A great friendship was like a great work of art, he thought. It took time and attention, and a spark of something that was impossible to describe. It was a happy, lucky accident, finding some kindred part of yourself in a total stranger.

The treasure secretly gathered in your heart will become evident through your creative work. —Albrecht Durer

A great friendship is like a work of art, he thought. It took time and attention, and a spark of something that was impossible to describe. It was a happy, lucky accident, finding some kindred part of yourself in a total stranger.

Oh teach me your art to soften his power, to unloose the grasp of his authority, and I will love you as——I believe I cannot love you better than I do; for have you not cast a ray of cheering light upon my dungeon?—Have you not bestowed upon me the only charm of existence that I have known for many and many a tedious day?

Barringer, Janice, and Sarah Schlesinger. The Pointe Book: Shoes, Training & Technique . Hightstown, NJ: Princeton Book Company, 1998, 2004.

Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes its quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other's lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave.

In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms.

It's a fact: black people in this country die more easily, at all ages, across genders. Look at how young black men die, and how middle-aged black men drop dead, and how black women are ravaged by HIV/AIDS. The numbers graft to poverty but they also graph to stresses known and invisible. How did we come here, after all? Not with upturned chins and bright eyes but rather in chains, across a chasm. But what did we do? We built a nation, and we built its art.

Of writing many books there is no end; And I who have written much in prose and verse For others' uses, will write now for mine,-- Will write my story for my better self, As when you paint your portrait for a friend, Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it Long after he has ceased to love you, just To hold together what he was and is.

OF writing many books there is no end; And I who have written much in prose and verse For others' uses, will write now for mine,- Will write my story for my better self, As when you paint your portrait for a friend, Who keeps it in a drawer and looks at it Long after he has ceased to love you, just To hold together what he was and is.

What is art but the life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

The chances are that, being a woman, young, And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, You write as well...and ill...upon the whole, As other women. If as well, what then? If even a little better,..still, what then? We want the Best in art now, or no art." (L144-149)

Good aims not always make good books.

Better far Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means, Than a sublime art frivolously.

This life's a dream, a fleeting show!' no indeed. That isn't my 'doxy.' I don't think that nothing is worth doing, but that everything is worth doing — everything good, of course — and that everything which does good for a moment does good for ever, in art as well as in morals.

That life is short and art long appears to us more true than usual when we lie all day long on a sofa and are as frightened of the east wind as if it were a tiger. Life is not only short, but uncertain, and art is not only long, but absorbing.

Not that Alexandre Dumas, Fils, excels generally in morals (in his books, I mean), but he is really a promising writer as to cleverness, and when he has learnt a little more art he will take no low rank as a novelist. Robert has just been reading a tale of his called 'Diane de Lys,' and throws it down with— 'You must read that, Ba — it is clever — only outrageous as to the morals.' Just what I should expect from Alexandre Dumas, Fils.

A novel flashes up for a season and does not often outlast it. For 'Mary Barton' I am a little, little disappointed, do you know. I have just done reading it. There is power and truth — she can shake and she can pierce — but I wish half the book away, it is so tedious every now and then; and besides I want more beauty, more air from the universal world — these classbooks must always be defective as works of art.

I heard of the Reverend somebody Stoddart gravely proposing 'Poetry for the Million' to his audience; he assuring them that 'poets made a mystery of their art,' but that in fact nothing except an English grammar, and a rhyming dictionary, and some instruction about counting on the fingers, was necessary in order to make a poet of any man! This is a fact. And to this extent has the art, once called divine, been desecrated among the educated classes of our country.