ART QUOTES VI

quotations about art

Art quote

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 highest art is always the most religious; and the greatest artist is always a devout man. A scoffing Raphael or Michelangelo is not conceivable.

JOHN STUART BLACKIE

On Beauty: three discourses delivered in the University of Edinburgh

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Doing a life study while drunk and in the process of being seduced is never a formula for quality art.

DAN SIMMONS

The Fall of Hyperion

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The meaning of a work of art is what the artist wants to communicate to his public through the work, by using a specific language. Since every language has its limitations and its problems of expression, there will be obstacles to communicating certain contents: a work's value is to be found in the ingenuity, the originality, and perhaps the economy of the solutions the artist finds to overcome these obstacles.

ERMANNO BENCIVENGA

Philosophy in Play

Tags: Ermanno Bencivenga


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


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

Tags: Fulke Greville, perfection


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

Tags: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, nature


Art is made by the alone for the alone.

LUIS BARRAGÁN

attributed, The Architects' Journal, 1976


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


That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.

OSCAR WILDE

"Art and the Handicraftsman"

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Art is awkward until technique has become an unconscious habit.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

LEO TOLSTOY

What is Art?

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True art consists in the concealment of art.

LEWIS F. KORNS

Thoughts

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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


I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success; but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. There are, of course, roads. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction -- you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Language of the Night

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Art matures. It is the formal elaboration of activity, complete in its own pattern. It is a cosmos of its own.

BAKER BROWNELL

Art Is Action

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The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.

MICHELLE OBAMA

remarks at the ribbon cutting ceremony for the Metropolitan Museum of Art American Wing, May 18, 2009

Tags: Michelle Obama, history


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


There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

PABLO PICASSO

Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views

Tags: Pablo Picasso, reality


A copy of the universe is not what is required of art; one of the damned things is ample.

REBECCA WEST

The Strange Necessity

Tags: Rebecca West, universe