ART QUOTES V

quotations about art

Art quote

A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

REBECCA WEST

The Strange Necessity

Tags: Rebecca West, universe


You need the art in order to love the life.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Anthologist

Tags: Nicholson Baker, life


There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.

CHARLES DICKENS

Nicholas Nickleby

Tags: Charles Dickens, painting


It is hard to convey the night-waking, body-trembling experience of putting a creation of one's soul out into the world for acceptance and rejection.

DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS

guest post, The Dark Phantom, October 29, 2008

Tags: Douglas Carlton Abrams


Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

Killing Yourself to Live

Tags: love


That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.

OSCAR WILDE

"Art and the Handicraftsman"

Tags: Oscar Wilde


Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"La Modernite", La Peintre de la Vie Moderne

Tags: Charles Baudelaire


Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO

Minima Moralia

Tags: Theodor W. Adorno


Art matures. It is the formal elaboration of activity, complete in its own pattern. It is a cosmos of its own.

BAKER BROWNELL

Art Is Action

Tags: Baker Brownell


Art is not Nature, art is Nature digested. Art is a sublime excrement.

GEORGE MOORE

Confessions of a Young Man

Tags: George Moore, nature


All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Ideas of Good and Evil

Tags: William Butler Yeats


When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.

HENRY MILLER

Tropic of Cancer

Tags: Henry Miller, chaos


The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.

MICHELLE OBAMA

remarks at the ribbon cutting ceremony for the Metropolitan Museum of Art American Wing, May 18, 2009

Tags: Michelle Obama, history


Realism and art cannot live together.

JENNETTE LEE

The Ibsen Secret

Tags: realism


I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.

MARY OLIVER

The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 9, 1992

Tags: Mary Oliver, imagination


Art is always aimed (like a rifle, if you wish) at the middle class. The working class has its own culture and will have no truck with fanciness of any kind. The upper class owns the world and thus needs know no more about the world than is necessary for its orderly exploitation. The notion that art cuts across class boundaries to stir the hearts of hoe hand and Morgan alike is, at best, a fiction useful to the artist, his Hail Mary. It is the poor puzzled bourgeoisie that is sufficiently uncertain, sufficiently hopeful, to pay attention to art. It follows (as the night the day) that the bourgeoisie should get it in the neck.

DONALD BARTHELME

"On the Level of Desire"

Tags: Donald Barthelme


Art is a little subversive, very subversive; it gets underneath the surface and reveals what is there; it is a Geiger counter for truth.

PAT B. ALLEN

Art Is a Spiritual Path

Tags: Pat B. Allen, truth


Art -- the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

JAMES THURBER

Collecting Himself

Tags: James Thurber


When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe

Tags: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, nature


The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

NORMAN MAILER

Western Review, winter 1959

Tags: Norman Mailer, morality