Quotes About Art

The poetic image exists apart from causality.

We cover the Universe with the drawings we have lived.

An author really ought to have nothing but flowers in the room where he works.

Words, when compared with feelings, are too concrete, too arbitrary, whereas feelings are richer but more elusive—ambiguous, if you will. Where words are muted, feelings begin.

I'd sooner cut off my hand and shove flowers in the stump than use this miserable excuse for pottery, but my friend is deranged enough to think otherwise.

Many modern artists, philosophers, and theologians reject the knowledge of the past. Thus they must continually start over again from ground zero, their vision restricted to their own narrow perspectives, making themselves artificially primitive.

our lives couldn't be viewed with detachment until they were half forgotten, like paintings which can be seen objectively only when the artists are long dead

of all the good things in the world, the only ones humanity can claim for itself are stories and music;

The painting was of that irritating kind which dissolves into mere blobs of color unless it can be seen as a whole. I took a step backward to get a better perspective of it, then another … With the third step, I realized I should have made contact with the wall behind me, and that I had not. I was standing instead inside the picture that had occupied the opposite wall: a dark room of ancient leather chairs and ebony tables.

Lange claimed that every photograph was a self-portrait of the photographer.

The discovery in art is often gradual, a process of minor discoveries riddled with uncertainties and the potential for making that which is discovered vanish before your eyes, like a mirage.

Photographers sometimes take pictures of each other; occasionally they take pictures of each other at work; more usually they take photographs - or versions - of each other's work. Consciously or not they are constantly in dialogue with their contemporaries and predecessors.

Arbus would later insist, 'the subject of the picture is always more important than the picture

Walker Evans said it was 'a pet subject' of his — how writers like James Joyce and Henry James were 'unconscious photographers'.

But for to telle yow al hir beautee, It lyth nat in my tonge, n'yn my konnyng; I dar nat undertake so heigh a thyng. Myn Englissh eek is insufficient. It moste been a rethor excellent That koude his colours longynge for that art, If he sholde hire discryven every part. I am noon swich, I moot speke as I kan.

Go litel bok, go, litel myn tragedye, Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye, So sende myght to make in som comedye! But litel book, no makyng thow n'envie, But subgit be to alle poesye; And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.

Her skin was not a surface; it was an indefinite glory of the palest rose and orange that chose to mould itself to those tense limbs.

The highly open expose themselves to new experiences, cultures, people, relationships, norms, ideas, worldviews, art, music, sexual practices, and drugs. They can get infected by nasty, maladaptive memes; they might end up believing in astrology, homeopathy, or Scientology.

Anyone who wishes to imply superiority in their particular line of work is apt to style themselves an artist. The imperatives of fitness display allow us to understand the passion with which people debate whether something is or is not an art. A claim that one's work is art is a claim for sexual and social status.

Slechts één ding is blijvend, een nooit eindigende schoonheid, die van de ene vorm overgaat in de andere, vluchtig doorgebladerd, voortdurend wisselend, maar die je zeker niet voor altijd kunt vasthouden, in musea neerzetten en in noten vastleggen kunt, om dan jong en oud erbij te roepen, zodat ze erover kunnen zwetsen en druk doen.

Beauty and art, no doubt, pervade all business of life like a kindly genius, and form the bright adornment of all our surroundings, both mental and material, soothing the sadness of our condition and the embarrassments of real life, killing time in entertaining fashion, and where there's nothing to be achieved, occupying the place of what is vicious, better, at any rate, than vice.

the Beautiful is the expression of the absolute Spirit, which is truth itself. This region of Divine truth as artistically presented to perception and feeling, forms the center of the whole world of Art. It is a self-contained, free, divine formation which has completely appropriated the elements of external form as material, and which employs them only as the means of manifesting itself.

My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative evolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice. [ From the will of GBS ]

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.