ART & ARTISTS
What Art really reveals to us
is Nature’s lack of design,
her curious crudities,
her extraordinary monotony,
her absolutely unfinished condition.
Art is our spirited protest,
our gallant attempt
to teach Nature her proper place.
( Oscar Wilde )
The more perfect the artist,
the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers
and the mind which creates.
( TS Eliot )
Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.
( Emerson )
Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin.
( Willa Cather )
An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality,
invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.
( Joseph Conrad )
After all, a masterpiece is in no hurry.
It transcends time.
It can be misunderstood or ignored - all this is quite unimportant,
and the time will come when its beauty
will be revealed without any outside assistance.
( Schönberg )
Simplicity is the final achievement.
After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes,
it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
( Chopin )
Art is a jealous mistress.
( Emerson )
Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.
( William Blake )
I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.
( Francois-Auguste Rodin,
when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues )
As a suffering creature, I cannot do without something greater than I - something that is my life: the power to create.
( Van Gogh )
God exists in the details.
( Mies van der Rohe )
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else,
a refining of the sense of truthfulness.
The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy;
only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
( Willa Cather )
No artist is ahead of his time.
He is his time; it is just that others are behind the times.
( Martha Graham )
Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously
that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.
( Jose Ortega y Gasset )
Artists are not engineers of the soul.
( John F Kennedy )
Art is the conscience of mankind.
( Friedrich Hebbel )
Artists believe not in innate qualities but in Art.
( Stravinsky )
Artists must be sacrificed to their art.
Like bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give.
( Emerson )
Artists who are enamored of practice without science
are like sailors who board a ship without rudder and compass,
never having any certainty as to whither they go.
( da Vinci )
In art everything must be thought out.
( Ravel )
Art is higher than reality and has no direct relation to reality.
Art should be above reality, otherwise it would have no value for man.
( Piet Mondrian )
All Art is quite useless.
( Oscar Wilde )
I adore art.
When I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds
and the tears stream from my eyes,
and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear.
( Verdi )
We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion
constitute the real content of a work of art.
( Ravel )
I would venture to warn against too great intimacy with artists
as it is very seductive and a little dangerous.
( Queen Victoria )
True Art is imperishable and the true artist finds profound delight
in grand productions of genius.
( Beethoven )
Thought that can merge wholly into feeling,
feeling that can merge wholly into thought –
these are the artist’s highest joy.
( Thomas Mann )
Art teaches us how to dream, to fantasize and to imagine.
( Bella Lewitzky )
We all know that Art is not truth.
Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth,
at least the truth that is given to us to understand.
( Picasso )
Beauty is truth,
Truth beauty.
( Keats )
The artist is the creator of beautiful things
( Oscar Wilde )
Great artists have no country.
( Alfred de Musset )
I tell you, there is no art but German art!
( Mahler )
Economics and art are strangers.
( Willa Cather )
Today it's not culture; it's box office.
( Alex North )
The world,
bludgeoned by entertainment
and suffocating on pop culture,
yearns for Art.
( Mikkelsen )
Man will begin to recover
the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry, or money.
( Ernest Levy )
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons,
because they make it possible for us to know,
if only imperfectly and for a little while,
what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
( Aldous Huxley )
Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality,
it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition,
it is imperfect and untrue.
( Benjamin Haydon )
True Art is selfish and inflexible –
it will not submit to the mould of flattery.
( Beethoven )
There is only one greatest goal towards which the artist strives:
to express himself.
( Schönberg )
Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties,
and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.
( Puccini )
Art is a house that tries to be haunted.
( Emily Dickinson )
Art never expresses anything but itself.
( Oscar Wilde )
There doesn’t have to be any reason in the field of aesthetics.
There isn’t any point to it.
There doesn’t have to be a point in it;
that is not demanded in the field of aesthetics.
( L Ron Hubbard )
The perfection of art is to conceal art.
( Marcus Fabius Quintilianus )
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
( Oscar Wilde )
Art is the only thing, and there is precious little of it.
( Raymond Chandler )
The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown,
he will give away his energies and his life
just to make sure that one note follows another...
and he leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.
( Leonard Bernstein )
They will not be able to rob me of my place
in the history of art.
( Beethoven )
While we adore images, we despise those who fashion them.
( Seneca )
I always said God was against art and I still believe it.
( Edward Elgar )
Talent works, Genius creates.
( Robert Schumann )
Art demands of us that we do not stand still.
( Beethoven )
Art!
Who comprehends her?
With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?
( Beethoven )
The essence of aesthetics is a wide differentiation,
the very essence of it – not logic.
( L Ron Hubbard )
Any work that aspires, however humbly,
to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.
( Joseph Conrad )
All art aspires to the condition of music.
( Paul Durcan )
We have art in order not to die of life.
( Camus )
Art is the triumph over chaos.
( John Chevver )
To send light into the darkness of men's hearts -
such is the duty of the artist.
( Robert Schumann )
No artist has ethical sympathies.
An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
( Oscar Wilde )
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.
( Bella Lewitzky )
No artist is ever morbid.
The Artist can express anything.
( Oscar Wilde )
The universe of thought is only one of many worlds;
each sense has its own;
each art has therefore its characteristic medium,
which cannot be translated into speech.
Even an artist writes about art in vain.
( Will Durant )
Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.
( Robert Schumann )
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
( WB Yeats )
In art, and in the higher ranges of science,
there is a feeling of harmony which underlies all endeavor.
There is no true greatness in art or science without that sense of harmony.
( Albert Einstein )
Were art to redeem man,
it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life
and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.
( Jose Ortega y Gasset )
In the case of an artist, weakness is nothing less than a crime,
when it is a weakness that paralyses the imagination.
( Oscar Wilde )
Art is too serious to be taken seriously.
( Ad Reinhardt )
In a free society art is not a weapon.
( John F Kennedy )
I must study politics and war that my sons
may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,
in order to give their children a right
to study painting, poetry and music.
( John Adams )
True art is imperishable.
( Beethoven )
The object of Art is not to reproduce reality,
but to create a reality of the same intensity.
( Alberto Giacometti )
[Art is] a product of the untalented,
sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
( Al Capp )
All the arts in America are a gigantic racket
run by unscrupulous men for unhealthy women.
( Sir Thomas Beecham )
Art does not tolerate reason.
( Albert Camus )
The biggest and widest canvas that you could paint
would be the canvas of life.
( L Ron Hubbard )
Every great work of art has two faces:
one toward its own time
and one toward the future, toward eternity.
( Daniel Barenboim )
Any great work of art
revives and readapts time and space,
and the measure of its success is the extent
to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world –
the extent to which it invites you in
and lets you breathe its strange special air.
( Leonard Bernstein )
To seek assiduously the most delicate and subtle features of human nature –
of the human crowd, to follow them into unknown regions,
to make them our own;
this seems to me the true vocation of the artist.
( Moussorgsky )
If we are to change our world view, images have to change.
The artist now has a very important job to do.
He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people,
he's really needed.
( David Hockney )
An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.
( Stravinsky )
Paradoxically though it may seem,
it is nonetheless true that life imitates art
far more than art imitates life.
( Oscar Wilde )
In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can aspire.
( Emerson )
The essence of all art is having pleasure giving pleasure.
( Mikhail Baryshinikov )
Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist:
Give me leave to do my utmost.
( Isak Dinesen, pen name of Karen Blixen )
Science is for those who learn;
poetry, for those who know.
( Joseph Roux )
A work of art that contains theories
is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
( Marcel Proust )
A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.
( Paul Cezanne )
