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Art Quotes
"For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power."
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"What I tell you three times is true."
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"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming about him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures."
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"The unrecognized genius-that's one old story. Have you ever thought of a much worse one-the genius recognized too well?"
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"Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."
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"Paris is the only city in the world where starving to death is still considered an art."
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"...a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit."
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"It's funny how the beauty of art has so much more to do with the frame than the artwork itself."
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"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."
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"The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions; the cat to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind. It is no accident that the contemplative Egyptians, together with such later poetic spirits as Poe, Gautier, Baudelaire, and Swinburne, were all sincere worshippers of the supple grimalkin."
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"He would argue with her about killing themselves; and explain how wicked people were; how he could see them making up lies as they passed in the street. He knew all their thoughts, he said; he knew everything. He knew the meaning of the world, he said."
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"Once you have heard the Indian Bamboo flute then everything else is just ordinary!"
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"The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)"
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"Critics write out of intellectual exercise, not poets. Poets write straight from the heart."
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"You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance."
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"We possess art lest we perish of the truth."
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"What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do."
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"The public wants work which flatters its illusions."
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"From the dim regions beyond the mountains at the upper end of our encircled domain, there crept out a narrow and deep river, brighter than all save the eyes of Eleonora; and, winding stealthily about in mazy courses, it passed away, at length, through a shadowy gorge, among hills still dimmer than those whence it had issued. We called it the "River of Silence"; for there seemed to be a hushing influence in its flow. No murmur arose from its bed, and so gently it wandered along, that the pearly pebbles upon which we loved to gaze, far down within its bosom, stirred not at all, but lay in a motionless content, each in its own old station, shining on gloriously forever."
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"I love deeply and admire the beauties of life and its expression in many different art forms. I am an aesthetic philosopher."
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"Words cannot always do the work we need them to. Music is there for when words fail us."
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"That's a poet.''I thought you said it was a bo-at.''Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?''Why, a thing to sail on the water in.''Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....'...'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too."
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"Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors..."
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"The morality of art consists, for everyone, in the side that flatters its own interests. People do not like literature."
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"Art is apotheosis; often, the complaint of beauty."
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"A dense, artistic kind of imperfection stimulates your consciousness, keeps you alert. If I listen to some utterly perfect performance of an utterly perfect piece while I'm driving, I might want to close my eyes and die right then and there. But listening to the D major, I can feel the limits of what humans are capable of-- that a certain type of perfection can only be realised through a limitless accumulation of imperfect."
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"The particulars of life do not matter to the artist, they merely provide him with the opportunity to lay bare his genius."
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"After that, I became kind of fascinated by her and by what I guessed was her ability to hear music in the silence. Back then, I'd wanted to be able to do that, too. So I took to watching her play, and though I told myself the reason for my attention was because she was as dedicated a musician as I was and that she was cute, the truth was that I also wanted to understand what she heard in the silence."
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"Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that's what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That's where you are. You've got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet."
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"My writing, it's my way of making sense of everything. My way to feel whole. May I never be complete and may I never feel content " please, let me always have the need, always have the urge to write."
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"Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think."
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"Verse in itself does not constitute poetry. Verse is only an elegant vestment for a beautiful form. Poetry can express itself in prose, but it does so more perfectly under the grace and majesty of verse. It is poetry of soul that inspires noble sentiments and noble actions as well as noble writings."
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"Then I played the song that hides in the center of me. That wordless music that moves through the secret places in my heart. I played it carefully, strumming it slow and low into the dark stillness of the night. I would like to say it is a happy song, that it is sweet and bright, but it is not."
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"Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life."
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"Galleries are frightening places, places of evaluation, of judgement."
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"It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realize his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realize their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realized, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting point for an ideal that is other than itself. This is why music is the perfect type of art. Music can never reveal its ultimate secret."
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