ART QUOTES VI

quotations about art

Art quote

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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
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Tropic of Cancer


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Tags: Henry Miller, chaos


The idea of a new art based upon science, in opposition to the art of the old world that was based on imagination, an art that should explain all things and embrace modern life in its entirety, in its endless ramifications, be, as it were, a new creed in a new civilization, filled me with wonder, and I stood dumb before the vastness of the conception, and the towering height of the ambition.

GEORGE MOORE

Confessions of a Young Man


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Tags: George Moore, science


Never judge a work of art by its defects.

WASHINGTON ALLSTON

attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern


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Tags: Washington Allston


Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

TONI MORRISON

Sula


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Tags: Toni Morrison, artists


Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

THOMAS MERTON

No Man Is an Island


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Tags: Thomas Merton


Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

JOHN BARTH

attributed, Writers Dreaming


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An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

JEAN COCTEAU

Newsweek, May 16, 1955


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Tags: Jean Cocteau, artists


Nothing is really so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.

GEORGE SANTAYANA

The Life of Reason


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Tags: George Santayana


True art, like nature, ever bears
Suggestions of some higher thing;
As more than form or tint of bird
We prize the song he stops to sing.

EDITH WILLIS LINN FORBES

"A Landscape in Oils"


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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


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Tags: love


We few, we happy few. No, we lucky few! Artists, wake up. Be gratified when our art is not taken by museums to rot in their storage vaults, probably never to be seen again. We should appreciate that we can and will survive without museums and the finely crafted words of those who will never know what it's like to create. Pick up some sand and run it through your fingers. Consider the long span of geological history and realize that our civilization won't last. All paintings and sculpture, including the great works of art, will be treated equally by time -- reduced to ashes and dust. This recognition puts me in my place but it is also a relief. Accepting mortality gives me the freedom to work without restraint, boundary or expectation.

BEN PERRONE

"Freedom to create art is a wonderful thing", Buffalo News, March 22, 2016


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The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought


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Tags: Austin O'Malley


Perhaps art is a quest for the perfect, or even the imperfect. Reality always falls short on both sides.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH

Letters to a Young Artist


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Tags: Anna Deavere Smith, perfection


It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

ANAIS NIN

attributed, The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations


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Tags: Anais Nin, perception


All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Ideas of Good and Evil


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Tags: William Butler Yeats


I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm.

SAUL BELLOW

The Paris Review, winter 1966


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Tags: Saul Bellow, chaos


There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.

REBECCA WEST

The Strange Necessity


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Tags: Rebecca West, mobs


Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

RAINER MARIA RILKE

letter, Feb. 17, 1903, Letters to a Young Poet


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Tags: Rainer Maria Rilke, criticism


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


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Tags: Pat B. Allen, truth


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


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Tags: Mary Oliver, imagination