Quotes About Interpretation

The birds did not understand a single word of what he was saying, but that made no matter, for they put their heads on one side, and looked wise, which is quite as good as understanding a thing, and very much easier.

Non vi sono libri morali o libri immorali. Vi sono libri scritti bene e libri scritti male, e nient'altro.

Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas and the soul that was within him? Could it be that what that soul thought, they realized? -- that what it dreamed, they made true?

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.

By the way, is there any difference between 'grey' and 'gray'? I believe there is, but I don't know what it is. In one place in the poem Smithers suggests 'gray'. In others he leaves 'grey'. Perhaps he is seeing red. I believe they are sympathetic colours in spectroscope investigations.

Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.

As it was, we always misunderstood ourselves, and rarely understood others.

Palabras! ¡Simples palabras! ¡Qué terribles eran! ¡Cuán claras, vívidas y crueles! Parece que uno no puede escaparse de ellas. ¡Y, sin embargo, qué magia sutil contienen! Parecen conferir una forma plástica a las cosas informes y tienen una música propia, tan dulce como la del violín o la del laúd. ¡Simples palabras! ¿Hay algo más real que las palabras?

But beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame. It will be to each man what he is himself. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

No Artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.

I had been foolish in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good looking, and that I could paint.

every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. the sitter is merely the accident, the occasion.

I rely on you to misrepresent me.

No existen libros morales o inmorales. Los libros están bien o mal escritos. Eso es todo.

The is nothing that art cannot express

We look to the archaeologist for the materials, to the artist for the method.

É o espectador, e não a vida, que a arte, na verdade, espelha.

Ningún artista es morboso. El artista está capacitado para expresarlo todo.

Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognisance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves.

art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity