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Art Quotes
"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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"My father referred to it as "the finest song ever written for fifteen fingers." He made me play it when I was getting too full of myself and felt I needed humbling. Suffice to say I practice it with fair regularity, sometimes more than once a day."
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"If both the performer and audience are on the same plane then it's not ART but SCIENCE, for ART is a personal expression that varies from one individual to another, while SCIENCE commands uniformity & certainty! What are YOU?"
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"Literature was the best plaything that had ever been invented to make fun of people."
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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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"Creativity is the fragrance of individual freedom."
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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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"In an age when nations and individuals routinely exchange murder for murder, when the healing grace of authentic spirituality is usurped by the divisive politics of religious organizations, and when broken hearts bleed pain in darkness without the relief of compassion, the voice of an exceptional poet producing exceptional work is not something the world can afford to dismiss."
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"Landscape painting is the obvious resource of misanthropy."
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"People listening to songs are like people reading novels: for a few minutes, for a few hours, someone else gets to come in and hijack that part of your brain that's always thinking. A good book or song kidnaps your interior voice and does all the driving. With the artist in charge you're free for a little while to leave your body and be someone else."
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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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"You can survive without artistry, but you cannot live without artistry."
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"The music of revelation announces itself to the reader in somber brooding tones or in melodies light as air and one is invited to dance with the most captivating of partners: poetry."
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"Poetry in the dark of the night you are my torch.Poetry makes you believe in the freedom in your own home.Poetry causes the increase of the human race.Poetry ennobles the spirit of man.Poetry is like a noble fragrance that caresses your soul.Poetry is the royal essence 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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"I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art."
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"Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse."
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"Art and the artist meet in stages, slowly revealing themselves until both are satisfied with what the other has become."
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"Black and white is refuge of colors from their own nullity."
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"You can be taught to write " you can't be taught to be an artist."
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"It was an irresistible development of modern illustration (so largely photographic) that borders should be abandoned and the "picture" end only with the paper. This method may be suitable for for photographs; but it is altogether inappropriate for the pictures that illustrate or are inspired by fairy-stories. An enchanted forest requires a margin, even an elaborate border. To print it coterminous with the page, like a "shot" of the Rockies in Picture Post, as if it were indeed a "snap" of fairyland or a "sketch by our artist on the spot", is a folly and an abuse."
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"History shows us that in times of people feeling like they are in need of some sort of rebellion or protests, the artists rise because the poetry we create about pain and its relationship to culture in the world begins to soothe and heal people who are feeling confused or afraid."
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"I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream."
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"That's what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call "personality", or maybe even "pain"."
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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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"There is no difference between being an artist and being in love."
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"Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous."
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"Like creating a masterpiece, quitting is an art: you have to decide what to keep within the frame and what to keep out."
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"I have never found a painter more beautiful than his paintings nor a writer who was more expressive than his works. While one got his hands dirty, other made the paper dirty to create masterpieces!"
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"To be a poet meansto live with a permanent wound forever susceptibleto either the shade of the skyor someone's eyes."
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"All that is best in the great poets of all countries is not what is national in them but what is universal."
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"Shall I tell you what rock and roll is, Johnno, from someone who doesn't perform, but observes? It's restless and rude. It's defiant and daring. It's a fist shaken at age. It's a voice that often screams out questions because the answers are always changing. The very young play it because they're searching for some way to express their anger or joy, their confusion and their dreams. Once in a while, and only once in a while, someone comes along who truly understands, who has the gift to transfer all those needs and emotions into music."
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"Perhaps behind our occasional hostility toward the artist and writer there may be a slight tinge of jealousy. The man or woman who for the sake of family life, children, takes up work he does not like, disciplines himself, sacrifices some fantasy he had once, to travel or to paint, or even possibly to write, may feel toward the artist and writer a jealousy of his adventurous life. The artist and the writer have generally paid the full price for their independence and for the privilege of doing work they love, or for their artistic rebellions against standardized living or values."
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"Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain."
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"[L]ife is a phenomenon in need of criticism, for we are, as fallen creatures, in permanent danger of worshipping false gods, of failing to understand ourselves and misinterpreting the behaviour of others, of growing unproductively anxious or desirous, and of losing ourselves to vanity and error. Surreptitiously and beguilingly, then, with humour or gravity, works of art--novels, poems, plays, paintings or films--can function as vehicles to explain our condition to us. They may act as guides to a truer, more judicious, more intelligent understanding of the world."
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"The artist speaks with inspiring tools of creativity. Thinkers challenge with the weapons of choice. These two forces are necessary to move souls beyond limitation."
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