Quotes About Art

Which painting in the National Gallery would I save if there was a fire? The one nearest the door of course.

Galatea never does quite like Pygmalion: his relation to her is too godlike to be altogether agreeable.

You don't get tired of muffins. But you don't find inspiration in them

Si usa uno specchio di vetro per guardare il viso; e si usano le opere d'arte per guardare la propria anima.

If an imaginative boy has a sufficiently rich mother who has intelligence, personal grace, dignity of character without harshness, and a cultivated sense of the best art of her time to enable her to make her house beautiful, she sets a standard for him against which very few women can struggle, besides effecting for him a disengagement of his affections, his sense of beauty, and his idealism from his specifically sexual impulses.

The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.

I am convinced that fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant, unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing.

Dancing: the vertical expression of a horizontal desire legalized by music.

What is the use of writing plays, what is the use of writing anything, if there is not a will which finally moulds chaos itself into a race of gods.

Vital art comes always from a cross between art and life: art being of one sex only, and quite sterile by itself. Such a cross is always possible; for though the artist may not have the capacity to bring his art into contact with the higher life of his time; fermenting in its religion, its philosophy, its science, and its statesmanship (perhaps indeed their may not be any statesmanship going), he can at least bring it into contact with the obvious life and common passions of the streets.

Yüzümüzü görmek için aynaya, ruhumuzu görmek için sanat yap?t?na bakar?z.

A woman told me her child was autistic, and I thought she said artistic. So I said, 'Oh great. I'd like to see some of the things he's done.

Although the photographer and the art thief were close friends, neither had ever taken the other's picture.

They give you a colouring book and some crayons, and tell you, be creative...but don't go outside the lines.

No art is possible without a dance with death.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.... Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.

It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never understand the higher, the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower. But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience, often with bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up by the wrong end, and fancying our space wider than it is.

Perhaps I feel about you as the artist does about the scene over which his soul has brooded with love: he would tremble to see it confided to other hands; he would never believe that it could bear for another all the meaning and the beauty it bears for him.

The best piety is to enjoy - when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth's character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight- in art or in anything else.

I have often felt since I have been in Rome that most of our lives would look much uglier and more bungling than the pictures, if they could be put on the wall." Dorothea

That is one reason why I did not like the pictures here, dear uncle–which you think me stupid about. I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false

At home, at school, among acquaintances, she had been used to have her conscious superiority admitted; and she had moved in a society where everything, from low arithmetic to high art, is of the amateur kind politely supposed to fall short of perfection only because gentlemen and ladies are not obliged to do more than they like - otherwise they would probably give forth abler writings and show themselves more commanding artists than any the world is at present obliged to put up with.