ART QUOTES VI

quotations about art

Art quote

Real art, like the wife of an affectionate husband, needs no ornaments. But counterfeit art, like a prostitute, must always be decked out. The cause of production of real art is the artist's inner need to express a feeling that has accumulated, just as for a mother the cause of sexual conception is love. The cause of counterfeit art, as of prostitution, is gain. The consequence of true art is the introduction of a new feeling into the intercourse of life, as the consequence of a wife's love is the birth of a new man into life. The consequences of counterfeit art are the perversion of man, pleasure which never satisfies, and the weakening of man's spiritual strength.

LEO TOLSTOY

What Is Art?

Tags: Leo Tolstoy


The great artist when he comes, uses everything that has been discovered or known about his art up to that point, being able to accept or reject in a time so short it seems that the knowledge was born with him, rather than that he takes instantly what it takes the ordinary man a lifetime to know, and then the great artist goes beyond what has been done or known and makes something of his own.

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Death in the Afternoon

Tags: Ernest Hemingway, artists


Art ... is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.

STEPHEN SONDHEIM

interview, July 5, 2005

Tags: Stephen Sondheim, chaos


That is one of the things a great work of art does. It stays there waiting for you to come back to it, and it shows you who you are now, each time a little different.

DANA SPIOTTA

Innocents and Others


Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.

HOWARD ZINN

"Artists of Resistance", The Historic Unfulfilled Promise

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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

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The function of art is to bring people into greater touch with reality, and yet our movie houses and family rooms are jammed with people after as much reality-removal as they can get.

EDWARD ALBEE

Stretching My Mind

Tags: Edward Albee, reality


The idea of a new art based upon science, in opposition to the art of the old world that was based on imagination, an art that should explain all things and embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless ramifications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civilization, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb before the vastness of the conception, and the towering height of the ambition.

GEORGE MOORE

Confessions of a Young Man

Tags: George Moore, science


Realism and art cannot live together.

JENNETTE LEE

The Ibsen Secret

Tags: realism


I believe that economic prosperity and cultural wealth go hand in hand. This is why it is important to even further promote the cultural arts during times of economic slowdown.

OH SEUNG-JE

"All That Korean Art Is There for a Reason", New York Times, March 16, 2016


Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.

VLADIMIR NABOKOV

Strong Opinions

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The transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer.

JOHN BERGER

The Sense of Sight

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Art, true art, is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

AMY LOWELL

Tendencies in Modern Poetry

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Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

letter, Feb. 17, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet

Tags: Rainer Maria Rilke, criticism


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


There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.

REBECCA WEST

The Strange Necessity

Tags: Rebecca West, mobs


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

Tags: Pablo Picasso, understanding


Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

GEORGE SANTAYANA

The Life of Reason

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Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.

JAMES JOYCE

Ulysses

Tags: James Joyce, ideas


Art is one of man's few serious activities.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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