Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.
Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.
Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.
Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One
Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.
Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
New arts destroy the old.
No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.
No great artist ever sees things as they really are, if he did he would cease to be an artist.
No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.
Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.
Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.
Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.
O, had I but followed the arts!
Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.
| Quotations 141 to 160 of 253 | First | < Previous | Next > | Last |