ART QUOTES V
quotations about art
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
CHARLES DICKENS
Nicholas Nickleby
Art is one of man's few serious activities.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
You need the art in order to love the life.
NICHOLSON BAKER
The Anthologist
Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
CHUCK KLOSTERMAN
Killing Yourself to Live
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO
Minima Moralia
Art is not Nature, art is Nature digested. Art is a sublime excrement.
GEORGE MOORE
Confessions of a Young Man
Art matures. It is the formal elaboration of activity, complete in its own pattern. It is a cosmos of its own.
BAKER BROWNELL
Art Is Action
Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
"La Modernite", La Peintre de la Vie Moderne
It is hard to convey the night-waking, body-trembling experience of putting a creation of one's soul out into the world for acceptance and rejection.
DOUGLAS CARLTON ABRAMS
guest post, The Dark Phantom, October 29, 2008
The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.
MICHELLE OBAMA
remarks at the ribbon cutting ceremony for the Metropolitan Museum of Art American Wing, May 18, 2009
Art is a little subversive, very subversive; it gets underneath the surface and reveals what is there; it is a Geiger counter for truth.
PAT B. ALLEN
Art Is a Spiritual Path
That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.
OSCAR WILDE
"Art and the Handicraftsman"
I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.
MARY OLIVER
The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 9, 1992
Realism and art cannot live together.
JENNETTE LEE
The Ibsen Secret
When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.
HENRY MILLER
Tropic of Cancer
When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Art -- the one achievement of man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.
JAMES THURBER
Collecting Himself
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
NORMAN MAILER
Western Review, winter 1959
The arts stop society going rotten and mad.
VANESSA REDGRAVE
interview, FT Magazine, Apr. 26, 2013
Don't make the mistake of believing it's enough to reproduce the realities of life.... The object of art is to give life a shape, and to do it by every conceivable artifice.
JEAN ANOUILH
The Rehearsal