art Quotes

“I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die. I am jealous of the portrait you have painted of me. Why should it keep what I must lose? Every moment that passes takes something from me and gives something to it. Oh, if it were only the other way! If the picture could change, and I could be always what I am now! Why did you paint it? It will mock me some day -- mock me horribly!”

“This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best. Night, sleep, and the stars.”

“For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it. It should have the dignity of a ceremony, as well as its unreality, and should combine the insincere character of a romantic play with the wit and beauty that make such plays delightful to us. Is insincerity such a terrible thing? I think not. It is merely a method by which we can multiply our personalities.”

“The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.”

“Art is supposed to represent how you see the world, not exactly copy it.”

His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one’s own.

“I wander around the room, looking at the artwork on the walls. These days, the only artists are in Amity. Abnegation sees art as impractical, and its appreciation as time that could be spent serving others, so though I have seen works of art in textbooks, I have never been in a decorated room before. It makes the air feel close and warm, and I could get lost here for hours without noticing.”

Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.

″“Do you like it?” asked Strawberry. Hazel puzzled over the stones. They were all the same size, and pushed at regular intervals into the soil. He could make nothing of them. “What are they for?” he asked again.”

“A prince ought also to show himself a patron of ability, and to honour the proficient in every art.”

“Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of heaven. The world is beautiful because they have lived; without them, laboring humanity would perish.”

“A passive life of enjoyment affords . . . [man] the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature.”

If art can help us grieve, can help us mourn, then lean on it.

“The Taliban became the enemy of fine arts, culture, and our history. The Swat Museum moved its collection away for safekeeping. The Taliban destroyed everything old and brought nothing new.”

“i am a museum full of art but you had your eyes shut”

“Your art would follow nature, just as a pupil imitates his master; ... your art is almost God’s grandchild.”

“When you think about it, for sheer bulk there’s more art done with Crayolas than with anything else. There must be billion of sheets of paper in every country in the world, in billions of boxes and closets and attics and cupboards, covered with billions of pictures in crayon. The imagination of the human race poured out like a river.”

“Oh my, but art is long and our life is fleeting.”

“Expectation. That is the true soul of art. If you can give a man more than he expects, then he will laud you his entire life. If you can create an air of anticipation and feed it properly, you will succeed.”

“The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing.”

“Nothing I have written or done has made any difference in this world, and suddenly I know what it means to rage, and to crave. I read the whole poem and eat it up, drink it up.”

“Eleanor was right: She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn’t supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.”

“‘This divorce of art from technology is completely unnatural. It’s just that it’s gone on so long you have to be an archaeologist to find out where the two separated. Rotisserie assembly is actually a long-lost branch of sculpture, so divorced from its roots by centuries of intellectual wrong turns that just to associate the two sounds ludicrous.‘”

“Modernism in art contributed to the new and challenging literary styles that were emerging in Paris and throughout Europe.[...] The new generation of writers believed that the elaborate language so typical of 19th century literature was a decadence.”

“And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.”

“Listen, Tommy, your art, it is important. And not just because it’s evidence. But for your own sake. You’ll get a lot from it, just for yourself.”

″‘Do you understand?’ My father looked at Andrius, hesitant. ‘You can help me find you,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll know it’s you…just like you know Munch. But you must be very careful.‘”

“The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity.”

“‘Sailing,’ he liked to joke, ‘is the fine art of getting wet and becoming ill, while going nowhere slowly at great expense.’”

“Every art, and every science reduced to a teachable form, and in like manner every action and moral choice, aims, it is thought, at some good.”

“In spite of feeling so very moved by the thing, I didn’t have any immediate theories about what it meant. Sometimes great art is like that. It affects you and you can’t say why. Was it deep symbolism? A cryptic message? A wrenching plea for help and understanding? Impossible to say, and to me, not the most important thing at first. I just wanted to breathe it in.”

“This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.”

“Call Me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.”

“The novel was about the end of the world in the year 2000, and the name of the book was 2000 A.D. It told about how mad scientists made a terrific bomb that wiped out the whole world.”

“Father needs some kind of book to read to people who are dying or in terrible pain. I don’t suppose you’ve written anything like that.”

″(The San Lorenzans) were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud.”

“Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them. ‘No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s….‘”

“There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were heightened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry. I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry. I used to wonder if he were hungry too when he painted; but I thought it was possibly only that he had forgotten to eat. It was one of those unsound but illuminating thoughts you have when you have been sleepless or hungry. Later I thought Cezanne was probably hungry in a different way.”

“Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.”

“No, I don’t think my conscience would let me support a strike like that. When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.”

“The edges of the drawings were yellowed and brittle, but they were all beautiful, and they were all by Georges Méliès.”

“Though Chicago was rapidly achieving recognition as an industrial and mercantile dynamo, its leading men felt keenly the slander from New York that their city had few cultural assets.”

“Art most consistently puts us in touch with our best self.”

“The soul of these books was a new understanding of Christianity, their direct consequence a new understanding of art.”

“The constancy of the wise is the art to contain their excitement in the heart.”

“Try to explain the art of starving to someone! Those who have no feel for it can never be made to understand.”

“No one, not even the starvation artist himself knew how great his achievement really was, and his heart grew heavy.”

“Why did the crowd, which pretended to admire him so much, have so little patience with him?”

“Any thought that abandons unity glorifies diversity. And diversity is the home of art.”

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

“God is love, I said, but art’s the possibility of forms, and shadows are the source of identity.”

“The most important thing about art is to work.”

“I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.”

“For Monet, on this occasion, water lilies were the measure of water lilies; and so he painted them.”

“Loud, heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low!”

″‘Did you draw this with your left hand or something?’ ‘I’m not an artist, okay?’ He pinched his chin. ‘Art quality aside, this is an elegant design.‘”

“Art is the conversation between lovers. Art offers an opening for the heart. True art makes the divine silence in the soul break into applause.”

“In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art--the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases--beauty was savage.”

“Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don’t burn the paintings in the Louvre, that’s all.”

“But there is one painting Olivia just doesn’t get. “I could do that in about five minutes.”

″‘How nice to meet you,’ cried Dodo. ‘You’re such an artist.‘”

The art is bewitching, and the story is both funny and full of heart. A winner for the whole family, because yes, irl babies do crawl away (though generally not so far) and older siblings are heroes.

“In Art we finally got to relax with a connect-the-dot picture. Too bad it turns out to be a connect-the-ancient-Mayan-numerals picture.”

“The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding.”

“Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can every quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as though she were the one to say them first. He had no religious belief, but it was impossible not to think of an invisible presence or witness in the room, and that these words spoken aloud were like signatures on an unseen contract.”

“Those who still think that listening isn’t an art should see if they can do it half as well.”

“Information about art and nature feels like the best stuff to have, and if you have it, you learn new things about the original thing.”

″...at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.”

″‘I want to go to art school and learn commercial art, but Dad wants me to be a barrister.’ ‘That’s like me,’ put in Jeremy. ‘I want to study music, but I’ve got to go into father’s office.‘”

“Because-they are saying, ‘one of the great art recoveries of history.’ And this is the part I hoped would please you- maybe not who knows, but I hoped. Museum masterworks, returned to public ownership! Stewardship of cultural treasure! Great joy! All the angels are singing! but it would never have happened, if not for you.”

“I did know. Because if possible to paint fakes that look like that? Las Vegas would be the most beautiful city in the history of earth! Anyway- so funny! Here I am, so proudly teaching you to steal apples and candy from the magazine, while you have stolen world masterpiece of art.”

“Because this is closed circle, you understand? Horst is right on the money about that. No one is going to buy this painting. Impossible to sell. But-black market, barter currency? Can be traded back and forth forever! Valuable, portable. Hotel rooms- going back and forth. Drugs, arms, girls, cash- whatever you life.”

“Now, carols are always beautiful, but if you are sad they can make you feel sadder.”

He was being what he wished most to be—an artist.

She caught endless colds sitting on damp grass to book ‘a delicious bit’, composed of a stone, a stump, one mushroom, and a broken mullein stalk, or ‘a heavenly mass of clouds’, that looked like a choice display of featherbeds when done. She sacrificed her complexion floating on the river in the midsummer sun to study light and shade, and got a wrinkle over her nose trying after ‘points of sight’, or whatever the squint-and-string performance is called.

If ‘genius is eternal patience’, as Michelangelo affirms, Amy had some claim to the divine attribute, for she persevered in spite of all obstacles, failures, and discouragements, firmly believing that in time she should do something worthy to be called ‘high art’.

“My wish was not to confine myself to domestic cares, or the caprices of any man, but to be an artist, and consequently free in heart, in person, and in thought.”

I rely much on external impressions; perhaps, with regard to you, they are immaterial, but I should be no artist if I had not some fancies.

She knew that in politics, in philosophy, in theology, Alexey Alexandrovitch often had doubts, and made investigations; but on questions of art and poetry, and, above all, of music, of which he was totally devoid of understanding, he had the most distinct and decided opinions. He was fond of talking about Shakespeare, Raphael, Beethoven, of the significance of new schools of poetry and music, all of which were classified by him with very conspicuous consistency.

“Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician.”

All art is at once surface and symbol.

“Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse.”

“Harry,” said Basil Hallward, looking him straight in the face, “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. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

“I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the world’s history. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also.”

“I loved you because you were marvellous, because you had genius and intellect, because you realized the dreams of great poets and gave shape and substance to the shadows of art.”

“Without your art, you are nothing.”

You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.

“Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.”

“It often seems to me that art conceals the artist far more completely than it ever reveals him.”

“Romance lives by repetition, and repetition converts an appetite into an art.”