ART QUOTES V
quotations about art
Never judge a work of art by its defects.
WASHINGTON ALLSTON
attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern
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
Art is a language that doesn't need to be translated.
AHMAD HARIRI
"How art is helping Syrian refugees keep their culture alive", The Guardian, March 2, 2016
Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.
C. S. LEWIS
On Stories and Other Essays in Literature
Keep doing what you like to do. That's all [art] is.
CORY ARCANGEL
interview with Stina Puotinen, Mar. 21, 2009
Nature is a haunted house -- but Art -- a House that tries to be haunted.
EMILY DICKINSON
letter to T. W. Higginson, 1876
If they who understand the utmost refinement of any art will enjoy the perfection of it in a manner superior to other men, will they not amply pay for that advantage in feeling more than other men the imperfection of it, which in the natural course of things must so much oftener fall in their way?
FULKE GREVILLE
Maxims, Characters, and Reflections
Realism and art cannot live together.
JENNETTE LEE
The Ibsen Secret
The artist does not really create; he discovers.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Great Companion
Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the songs of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them.
PABLO PICASSO
Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views
Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.
DAN SIMMONS
The Fall of Hyperion
Now the culture is made of old things, it's a collage. Art made out of art is not art. You're supposed to make art out of life.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
interview, Paper Magazine, September 17, 2014
An artist's only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
J. D. SALINGER
Zooey
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
Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
Strong Opinions
There are many brave artists who dare to reveal what's most precious to them. Who dare to step into the world without protective layer. Open. Vulnerable. Exposed.
ESTHER DE CHARON DE SAINT GERMAIN
"Why Art Is Important for Highly Sensitive Persons", Huffington Post, March 15, 2016
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
LEO TOLSTOY
What is Art?
Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.
VIRGINIA WOOLF
attributed, Languages of Art
One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.
DONALD BARTHELME
"Reifications"
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit