top of page
"Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake."
Standard
Customized
Exlpore more Art quotes

"And it seemed at last that there were two musics progressing at one time before the seat of IlAovatar, and they were utterly at variance. The one was deep and wide ad beautiful, but slow and blended with an immeasurable sorrow from which its beauty chiefly came."

"The kind of poem I produced in those days was hardly anything more than a sign I made of being alive, of passing or having passed, or hoping to pass, through certain intense human emotions. It was a phenomenon of orientation rather than of art, thus comparable to stripes of paint on a roadside rock or to a pillared heap of stones marking a mountain trail. But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time."

"The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness."

"Let music ignite your vivid inner colors and bring you harmony inside and out."

"The essence of art is that its one case applies to thousands,' knew Schopenhauer."

"With writing, we have second chances."

"The art of art the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters is simplicity: nothing is better than simplicity."
Explore more quotes by Julian Barnes

"Books say: she did this because. Life says: she did this. Books are where things are explained to you, life where things aren't."

"You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a fucking mess."

"The mechanism of natural selection depends on the survival, not of the strongest, nor the most intelligent, but of the most adaptable."

"I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen."

"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but-mainly-to ourselves."

"Well, they each seem to do one thing well enough, but fail to realize that literature depends on doing several things well at the same time."

"Altitude reduces all things to their relative proportions, and to the truth. Cares, remorse, disgust become strangers: How easily indifference, contempt, forgetfulness drop away...and forgiveness descends."
bottom of page