Art Quotations
Art
From Wikiquote Art is made by the alone for the alone. ~ Luis Barragán All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art. ~ Jorge Luis Borges Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse. ~ Winston Churchill Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality. ~ John Dewey All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography. ~ Federico Fellini Beauty is at once the ultimate principle and the highest aim of art. ~ Goethe I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream. ~ Vincent van Gogh Most artists are surrealists. ... always dreaming something and then they paint it. ~ Dong Kingman Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity — reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel — Art. ~ Herman Melville Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John. ~ Boris Pasternak Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited. ~ William Saroyan We can forgive a man for making a useful thing, as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless. ~ Oscar WildeArt is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music and literature. The meaning of art is explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics.
Quotes
- Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
- Theodor Adorno in Minima Moralia (1951), as translated by E. Jephcott (1974), § 143, p. 222
- Light is impressionism.
- Gae Aulenti, On positioning galleries for impressionist and post impressionist paintings at the top of her design for Paris's Musée d'Orsay, Time (8 December 1986)
- This museum is a torpedo moving through time, its head the ever-advancing present, its tail the ever-receding past of 50 to 100 years ago.
- Alfred Barr, Newsweek (1 June 1964)
- Art is made by the alone for the alone.
- Luis Barragán, Time (12 May 1980) Originally in Cyril Connolly's "The Unquiet Grave" (1944), cited by Emilio Ambasz in "The Architecture of Luis Barragán" (1976)
- Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.
- Leonard Baskin, Publishers Weekly (5 April 1965)
- 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, "What Makes Opera Grand?" Vogue (December 1958)
- A writer — and, I believe, generally all persons — must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
- Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems : Interviews by Roberto Alifano, 1981–1983 (1984)
- While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
- Ray Bradbury in his Preface to Zen in the Art of Writing (1990)
- It's true that things are beautiful when they work. Art is function.
- Giannina Braschi in Empire of Dreams (1994)
- Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.
- Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici (1642), Part I, Section 16
- If the world were clear, art would not exist.
- Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), "Absurd Creation" (Tr. Justin O'Brien, Vantage International, 1991, ISBN 0-679-73373-6, p. 98)
- Art is the triumph over chaos.
- John Cheever, The Stories of John Cheever Knopf (1978)
- Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.
- G. K. Chesterton, as quoted in Arts magazine: Vol. 1 (1926), also in The Golden Book magazine, Vol. 7, (1928) by Henry Wysham Lanier, p. 323
- Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
- Winston Churchill, To Royal Academy of Arts, Time (11 May 1953)
- I do a bale of sketches, one eye, a piece of hair. A pound of observation, then an ounce of painting.
- Gardner Cox on his portraits, Washington Post (31 May 1975)
- Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.
- Salvador Dalí, People (27 September 1976)
- Art is the complement of science. Science as I have said is concerned wholly with relations, not with individuals. Art, on the other hand, is not only the disclosure of the individuality of the artist but also a manifestation of individuality as creative of the future, in an unprecedented response to conditions as they were in the past. Some artists in their vision of what might be but is not, have been conscious rebels. But conscious protest and revolt is not the form which the labor of the artist in creation of the future must necessarily take. Discontent with things as they are is normally the expression of the vision of what may be and is not, art in being the manifestation of individuality is this prophetic vision.
- John Dewey, Time and Individuality (1940)
- Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality. Those who have the gift of creative expression in unusually large measure disclose the meaning of the individuality of others to those others. In participating in the work of art, they become artists in their activity. They learn to know and honor individuality in whatever form it appears. The fountains of creative activity are discovered and released. The free individuality which is the source of art is also the final source of creative development in time.
- John Dewey, Time and Individuality (1940)
- ...the significant problems and issues of life and philosophy concern the rate and mode of the conjunction of the precarious and the assured, the incomplete and the finished, the repetitious and the varying, the safe and sane and the hazardous. ...these traits, and the modes and tempos of their interaction with each other, are fundamental features of natural existence. The experience of their various consequences, according as they are relatively isolated, unhappily or happily combined, is evidence that wisdom, and hence the love of wisdom which is philosophy, is concerned with choice and administration of their proportioned union. Structure and process, substance and accident, matter and energy, permanence and flux, one and many, continuity and discreetness, order and progress, law and liberty, uniformity and growth, tradition and innovation, rational will and impelling desires, proof and discovery, the actual and the possible, are names given to various phases of their conjunction, and the issue of living depends upon the art with which these things are adjusted to each other.
- John Dewey, "Existence as Precarious and as Stable", Experience and Nature (1925)
- Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
- T. S. Eliot in Philip Massinger, in The Sacred Wood (1920); also variously attributed to Philip Massinger, who is instead the subject, and to Lionel Trilling (Esquire, September 1962), who is quoting Eliot, and in the form.
- Rationality is what we do to organize the world, to make it possible to predict. Art is the rehearsal for the inapplicability and failure of that process.
- Brian Eno, A Year With Swollen Appendices (1995), p. 272, ISBN 0571179959
- All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
- Federico Fellini, Atlantic (December 1965)
- No government has the right to decide on the truth of scientific principles, nor to prescribe in any way the character of the questions investigated. Neither may a government determine the aesthetic value of artistic creations, nor limit the forms of literacy or artistic expression. Nor should it pronounce on the validity of economic, historic, religious, or philosophical doctrines. Instead it has a duty to its citizens to maintain the freedom, to let those citizens contribute to the further adventure and the development of the human race.
- Richard Feynman, "The Uncertainty of Values", in The Meaning of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen Scientist (1999)
- Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away.
- Alberto Giacometti, On his choice of models, quoted by James Lord in Giacometti (1985)
- The studio, a room to which the artist consigns himself for life, is naturally important, not only as workplace, but as a source of inspiration. And it usually manages, one way or another, to turn up in his product.
- Grace Glueck, The New York Times (29 June 1984)
- The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by artists to prove that only a great artist can be a great technician. The name of Leonardo da Vinci will be invoked by technicians to prove that only a great technician can be a great artist.
- Alex Gross, East Village Other (1968)
- The artistic decline we are seeing culturally is very prominent, very clear right now if you just look at what people are accepting as art. It affects me personally because art culture is something so important to me; art affects me and it means so much to me whether it be music, literature, fashion, design, fine art — it's all so important, I think it's really what, at least for me, it's what life is about, it’s what’s important, it’s what’s moving, it’s what inspires you, it’s what life is about. So when we’re seeing such decline in that art culture right now it’s heartbreaking to me.
- Davey Havok, Skinnie magazine, March 2010, p. 29
- If the subject of art
will be a broken jug
a small broken soul
with a great self-pity
what will remain of us
will be like tears of lovers
in a small dirty hotel
when wallpapers dawn
- Zbigniew Herbert in Why the Classics.
- Art quickens nature; care will make a face; Neglected beauty perisheth apace.
- Robert Herrick, Hesperides (1648), "Neglect".
- One thing, however, did become clear to him [Goldmund] – why so many perfect works of art did not please him at all, why they were almost hateful and boring to him, in spite of a certain undeniable beauty. Workshops, churches, and palaces were full of these fatal works of art; he had even helped with a few himself. They were deeply disappointing because they aroused the desire for the highest and did not fulfill it. They lacked the most essential thing – mystery. That was what dreams and truly great works of art had in common: mystery.
- Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)
- While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual and the sublime are today suspect I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art.
- Ian Hornak, Cover Magazine (1994)
- My idea of a perfect surrealist painting is one in which every detail is perfectly realistic, yet filled with a surrealistic, dreamlike mood. And the viewer himself can't understand why that mood exists, because there are no dripping watches or grotesque shapes as reference points. That is what I'm after: that mood which is apart from everyday life, the type of mood that one experiences at very special moments.
- Ian Hornak, The 57th Street Review (January 1976)
- All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality.
- Joseph Conrad, in Henry James — An Appreciation (1905)
- [It] is that rare impressionist painting where people don't judge the light, but rather are judged by it.
- Alexandra Johnson, On Terrace at Sainte-Adresse by Claude Monet, Christian Science Monitor (1 October 1980)
- Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.
- Ben Jonson, Every Man out of His Humour (1598), Act I, scene 1
- Three men riding on a bicycle which has only one wheel, I guess that's surrealist.
- Dong Kingman, Twenty-two Famous Painters and Illustrators Tell How They Work (1964)
- Most artists are surrealists. ... always dreaming something and then they paint it.
- Dong Kingman, Twenty-two Famous Painters and Illustrators Tell How They Work (1964)
- The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.
- Hilton Kramer, The New York Times art critic, in the late 1960s when the term "minimal art" was in vogue; reported in Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations (1989).
- Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator.
- Lawrence Lessig, "May the Source Be With You", Wired magazine article (9 December 2001)
- All art is solitary and the studio is a torture area.
- Alexander Liberman, The New York Times (13 May 1979)
- Art is long, and time is fleeting.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life (1839), stanza 4
- The Art Snob can be recognized in the home by the quick look he gives the pictures on your walls, quick but penetrating, as though he were undressing them. This is followed either by complete and pained silence or a comment such as 'That's really a very pleasant little water color you have there.'
- Russell Lynes, Snobs (1950).
- The Art Snob will stand back from a picture at some distance, his head cocked slightly to one side. ... After a long period of gazing (during which he may occasionally squint his eyes), he will approach to within a few inches of the picture and examine the brushwork; he will then return to his former distant position, give the picture another glance and walk away.
- Russell Lynes, Snobs (1950)
- If you seek just a little truth, as most, you should not ignore abstract forms, the basis from which all short-lived experiences we call reality springs.
- Can someone eat the fruit that comes from the tree of action that grows from the seeds of your mind?.
- Eugene J. Martin, from Eugene James Martin's website.
- The bird of truth would not be able to fly if it weren't for the air of lies we breathe.
- Eugene J. Martin, from Eugene James Martin's website.
- Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice.
- Filippo Tommaso Marinetti from The Futurist Manifesto.
- Art indeed is long, but life is short.
- Andrew Marvell, Upon the Death of Lord Hastings (1649), last line.
- Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.
- Henri Matisse, Matisse (Rizzoli 1984).
- It is only after years of preparation that the young [artist] should touch color — not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.
- Henri Matisse in Christian Science Monitor (25 March 1985)
- Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.
- Henri Matisse in Christian Science Monitor (25 March 1985)
- Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity — reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel — Art.
- Herman Melville, Timoleon, Art (1891)
- My job is to make art expensive.
- Tobias Meyer in The New Yorker, 20 March 2006, pp. 88-100
- The more I look at most of the art movements, it’s all occultism, when you get down to it. The Surrealists were openly talking about being magicians.
- Alan Moore, from an "Alan Moore Interview" by Matthew De Abaitua (1998), later published in Alan Moore: Conversations (2011) edited by Eric L. Berlatsky
- I don’t distinguish between magic and art. When I got into magic, I realised I had been doing it all along, ever since I wrote my first pathetic story or poem when I was twelve or whatever. This has all been my magic, my way of dealing with it.
- Alan Moore, from an "Alan Moore Interview" by Matthew De Abaitua (1998), later published in Alan Moore: Conversations (2011) edited by Eric L. Berlatsky
- Most painting in the European tradition was painting the mask. Modern art rejected all that. Our subject matter was the person behind the mask.
- Robert Motherwell in The Times (17 November 1985)
- Many are willing to suffer for their art. Few are willing to learn to draw.
- Simon Munnery, Attention Scum
- ...science, spurred by its powerful illusion, speeds irresistibly towards its limits where its optimism, concealed in the essence of logic, suffers shipwreck. For the periphery of the circle of science has an infinite number of points...noble and gifted men...reach...inevitably, such boundary points on the periphery from which one gazes into what defies illumination. When they see to their horror how logic coils up at these boundaries and finally bites its own tail-suddenly the new form of insight breaks through, tragic insight which, merely to be endured, needs art as a protection and a remedy.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music
- He searched disorder for its unifying principle.
- Brian O'Doherty, On Stuart Davis, abstractionist whose work prefigured pop art, The New York Times (26 June 1964)
- Art is marks on canvas trying to find a place to live.
- Bill O'Leary in Antique Shop
- 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. The symbol of art is seen again in the magic flute of the Great God Pan which makes the young goats frisk at the edge of the grove.
All modern art begins to appear comprehensible and in a way great when it is interpreted as an attempt to instill youthfulness into an ancient world.
- José Ortega y Gasset, in "Art a Thing of No Consequence", The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel [La deshumanización del Arte e Ideas sobre la novela] (1925)
- I don't live in the present, I Am The Present
- Paul Palnik in Creativity (1996)
- Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.
- Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, translated by Max Hayward and Manya Harari (Pantheon 1958)
- For a long time I limited myself to one color — as a form of discipline.
- Pablo Picasso, On his blue and rose periods, Picasso on Art
- Abstract painting is abstract. It confronts you.
- Jackson Pollock in Jackson Pollock (1967) by Francis V O'Connor
- Things are not all so comprehensible and expressible as one would mostly have us believe; most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art, mysterious existences, the life of which, while ours passes away, endures.
- Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet
- Art means to dare — and to have been right.
- Ned Rorem W magazine (10 October 1980)
- Art is what is irresistible.
- William Saroyan, as quoted by William Bolcolm in "The End of the Mannerist Century" (2004), The Pleasure of Modernist Music, Ashby, Arved, ed. ISBN 1580461433
- The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.
- William Saroyan Recalled at his Broadway memorial service, The New York Times (31 October 83)
- It holds up in one object or one surface, in one bright, luminous and concentrated thing — whether a beer can or a flag — all the dispersed elements that go to make up our lives.
- Robert C. Scull on his collection of pop and minimal art, Time (21 February 1964)
- After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.
- David Sedaris Me Talk Pretty One Day
- Dead artists always bring out an older, richer crowd.
- Elizabeth Shaw, on a fauvism exhibition that drew 2,000 people, The New York Times (26 March 1976)
- To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow.
- William Shakespeare, King John (1598), Act IV, scene 2, line 11
- In framing an artist, art hath thus decreed,
To make some good, but others to exceed.
- William Shakespeare, Pericles, Prince of Tyre (c. 1607-08), Act II, scene 3, line 15
- His art with nature's workmanship at strife,
As if the dead the living should exceed.
- William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (1593), line 291
- Bad art is more tragically beautiful than good art, because it documents human failure.
- Henry Letham, Stay
- There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.
- Gertrude Stein. Paris France. New York: Liveright, 1970. (p. 12)
- Art is a human activity consisting in this, that one consciously, by means of certain external symbols, conveys to others the feelings one has experienced, whereby people so infected by these feelings, also experience them.
- Leo Tolstoy, in What is Art? (1896)
- In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life. ...Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of effective communication between people.
- Leo Tolstoy, What is Art? (1896)
- Art happens all the time, everywhere. All we have to do is to keep our minds open.
- Jacek Tylicki, in Les Krantz, The New York Art Review, 1988
- The very object of an art, the principle of its artifice, is precisely to impart the impression of an ideal state in which the man who reaches it will be capable of spontaneously producing, with no effort of hesitation, a magnificent and wonderfully ordered expression of his nature and our destinies.
- Paul Valery - Remarks on Poetry in The Art of Poetry, Vintage, 1958, p. 215
- Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
- Simone Weil, The Pre-War Notebook (1933-1939), published in First and Last Notebooks (1970) edited by Richard Rees
- Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. Crime, which, under certain conditions, may seem to have created Individualism, must take cognisance of other people and interfere with them. It belongs to the sphere of action. But alone, without any reference to his neighbours, without any interference, the artist can fashion a beautiful thing; and if he does not do it solely for his own pleasure, he is not an artist at all.
- Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)
- Art is individualism, and individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. There lies its immense value. For what it seeks is to disturb monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
- Oscar Wilde in The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891)
- In short, if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.
- Virginia Woolf in The Three Guineas
- I don't really have studios. I wander around — around people's attics, out in fields, in cellars, anyplace I find that invites me.
- Andrew Wyeth, TIME magazine (18 August 1986)
Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations
- Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 43-45.
- No work of art is worth the bones of a Pomeranian Grenadier.
- Quoted by Otto von Bismarck; possibly a phrase of Frederick the Great.
- It is the glory and good of Art,
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.
- Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book, The Book and the Ring, line 842
- Etenim omnes artes, quæ ad humanitatem pertinent, habent quoddam commune vinculum, et quasi cognatione quadam inter se continentur.
- All the arts which belong to polished life have some common tie, and are connected as it were by some relationship.
- Cicero, Oratio Pro Licinio Archia, I
- L'arte vostra quella, quanto puote,
Seque, come il maestro fa il discente;
Si che vostr'arte a Dio quasi è nipote.
- Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild.
- Dante Alighieri, Inferno, XI. 103
- There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.
- Isaac D'Israeli, Literary Character, Chapter XI
- All passes, Art alone
Enduring stays to us;
The Bust out-lasts the throne,—
The coin, Tiberius.
- Austin Dobson, Ars Victrix (imitated from Théophile Gautier)
- The conscious utterance of thought, by speech or action, to any end, is art.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Society and Solitude, Art
- L'Art supreme
Seule a l'eternité
Et le buste
Survit la cité.
- High art alone is eternal and the bust outlives the city.
- Théophile Gautier, L'Art
- As all Nature's thousand changes
But one changeless God proclaim;
So in Art's wide kingdom ranges
One sole meaning still the same:
This is Truth, eternal Reason,
Which from Beauty takes its dress,
And serene through time and season
Stands for aye in loveliness.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Travels, Chapter XIV (Chapter III, 128 of Carlyle's Ed)
- His pencil was striking, resistless, and grand;
His manners were gentle, complying, and bland;
Still born to improve us in every part,
His pencil our faces, his manners our heart.
- Oliver Goldsmith, Retaliation (1774), line 139
- The canvas glow'd beyond ev'n nature warm;
The pregnant quarry teem'd with human form.
- Oliver Goldsmith, The Traveller (1764), line 137
- The perfection of an art consists in the employment of a comprehensive system of laws, commensurate to every purpose within its scope, but concealed from the eye of the spectator; and in the production of effects that seem to flow forth spontaneously, as though uncontrolled by their influence, and which are equally excellent, whether regarded individually, or in reference to the proposed result.
- John Mason Good, The Book of Nature, Series 1, Lecture LX
- Ars longa, vita brevis est.
- Art [of healing] is long, but life is fleeting.
- Hippocrates, Aphorismi, I, Nobilissimus Medicus; Translated from the Greek. Goethe, Wilhelm Meister, VII, 9
- The temple of art is built of words. Painting and sculpture and music are but the blazon of its windows, borrowing all their significance from the light, and suggestive only of the temple's uses.
- Josiah Gilbert Holland, Plain Talks on Familiar Subjects, Art and Life
- It is not strength, but art, obtains the prize,
And to be swift is less than to be wise.
'Tis more by art, than force of numerous strokes.
- Homer, The Iliad, Book 23, line 382. Pope's translation
- Pictoribus atque poetis
Quidlibet audendi semper fuit æqua potestas.
- Painters and poets have equal license in regard to everything.
- Horace, Ars Poetica (18 BC), 9
- Piety in art—poetry in art—Puseyism in art—let us be careful how we confound them.
- Mrs. Jameson, Memoirs and Essays, The House of Titian
- We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice peg,
We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yelk of an addled egg.
We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart,
But the devil whoops, as he whooped of old; It's clever, but is it art?
- Rudyard Kipling, The Conundrum of the Workshops
- Art is Power.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Hyperion (1839), Book III, Chapter V
- The counterfeit and counterpart
Of Nature reproduced in art.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kéramos (1878), line 380
- Art is the child of Nature; yes,
Her darling child in whom we trace
The features of the mother's face,
Her aspect and her attitude.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Kéramos (1878), line 382
- Dead he is not, but departed,—for the artist never dies.
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Nuremburg, Stanza 13
- For Art is Nature made by Man
To Man the interpreter of God.
- Owen Meredith (Lord Lytton), The Artist, Stanza 26
- The heart desires,
The hand refrains,
The Godhead fires,
The soul attains.
- William Morris; inscribed on the four pictures of Pygmalion and Galatea by Burne-Jones, in the Grosvenor Gallery, London
- Arte citæ veloque rates remoque moventur;
Arte levis currus, arte regendus Amor.
- By arts, sails, and oars, ships are rapidly moved; arts move the light chariot, and establish love.
- Ovid, Ars Amatoria, I. 3
- The perfection of art is to conceal art.
- Die Kunst ist zwar nicht das Brod, aber der Wein des Lebens.
- Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life.
- Jean Paul Richter
- Greater completion marks the progress of art, absolute completion usually its decline.
- John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Chapter IV, Part XXX, The Lamp of Beauty
- Seraphs share with thee
Knowledge; But Art, O Man, is thine alone!
- Friedrich Schiller, The Artists, Stanza 2
- Von der Freiheit gesäugt wachsen die Künste der Lust.
- All the arts of pleasure grow when suckled by freedom.
- Friedrich Schiller, Der Spaziergang, line 122
- Kunst ist die rechte Hand der Natur. Diese hat nur Geschöpfe, jene hat Menschen gemacht.
- Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.
- Friedrich Schiller, Fiesco, II. 17
- Schwer ist die Kunst, vergänglich ist ihr Preis.
- Art is difficult, transient is her reward.
- Friedrich Schiller, Wallenstein, Prolog, line 40
- Illa maximi medicorum exclamatio est, Vitam brevem esse, longam artem.
- That is the utterance of the greatest of physicians, that life is short and art long.
- Seneca, De Brevitate Vitæ, I
- It was Homer who gave laws to the artist.
- Francis Wayland, The Iliad and the Bible
- Around the mighty master came
The marvels which his pencil wrought,
Those miracles of power whose fame
Is wide as human thought.
- John Greenleaf Whittier, Raphael, Stanza 8
See also
Wikipedia has an article about: Art Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Art Look up art in Wiktionary, the free dictionary Wikisource has original text related to: Category:Art Wikibooks has a book on the topic of Art Wikinews has news related to this article: Special:Search/Art Category:
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