ART QUOTES IV

quotations about art

Art quote

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


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

CHARLES DICKENS

Nicholas Nickleby

Tags: Charles Dickens, painting


Art, even as poetry, was to become not an escape from the narrowness of lived reality, but the overflow of intensified life.

ANNA BALAKIAN

Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute

Tags: Anna Balakian


You need the art in order to love the life.

NICHOLSON BAKER

The Anthologist

Tags: Nicholson Baker, life


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 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


True art consists in the concealment of art.

LEWIS F. KORNS

Thoughts

Tags: Lewis F. Korns


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


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


The artist does not really create; he discovers.

LYMAN ABBOTT

The Great Companion

Tags: Lyman Abbott


Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

JOHN BARTH

attributed, Writers Dreaming


All passes. Art alone
Enduring stays to us;
The Bust outlasts the throne,--
The Coin, Tiberius.

HENRY AUSTIN DOBSON

Ars Victrix

Tags: Henry Austin Dobson


All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

JAMES BALDWIN

Esquire, April 1960

Tags: James Baldwin


I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

"Riding with Death: The Final Years", Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960-1988

Tags: life


The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

Tags: Austin O'Malley


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

Tags: Fran Lebowitz


Art is an infinitely precious good, a draught both refreshing and cheering which restores the stomach and the mind to the natural equilibrium of the ideal.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

preface, Salon of 1846

Tags: Charles Baudelaire


No art is possible without a dance with death.

KURT VONNEGUT

Slaughterhouse-Five

Tags: Kurt Vonnegut, death


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"

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