ART QUOTES IV
quotations about art
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
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
CHARLES DICKENS
Nicholas Nickleby
True art required the right amount of uncertainty, just as gourmet cooking needed the proper spices and flavors.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term "Art," I should call it "the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul." The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of "Artist".
EDGAR ALLAN POE
"Marginalia"
Art was as much in the activity as in the results. Works of art were not just the finished product, but the thought, the action, the process that created them.
JEAN M. AUEL
The Mammoth Hunters
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
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
The artist does not really create; he discovers.
LYMAN ABBOTT
The Great Companion
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
Art is not Nature, art is Nature digested. Art is a sublime excrement.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G. K. CHESTERTON
Art Like Morality Consists in Drawing the Line Somewhere
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.
HENRY WARD BEECHER
Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
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
Keep doing what you like to do. That's all [art] is.
CORY ARCANGEL
interview with Stina Puotinen, Mar. 21, 2009
The work of art still has something in common with enchantment: it posits its own, self-enclosed area, which is withdrawn from the context of profane existence, and in which special laws apply.
THEODOR W. ADORNO
Dialectic of Enlightenment
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
Art ... is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM
interview, July 5, 2005
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, 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
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