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Art ... is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.
STEPHEN SONDHEIM, interview, July 5, 2005
Art never expresses anything but itself.
OSCAR WILDE, The Decay of Lying
Whether it is the beautiful that brings to our hearts the love of truth and justice, or whether it is truth that teaches us how to find the beautiful in nature and how to love it, in eather case art does a noble work. It drags out the soul from its everyday shell, and brings it under the spell of its own mysterious and wonderful power, so that a memory of this experience stays with the people, sustains them in their daily labors, and refines their minds.
HELENA MODJESKA, "Women and the Stage," The World's Congress of Representative Women
The art of art, the glory of expression, and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.
WALT WHITMAN, Preface to Leaves of Grass
Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul, and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.
To know how to produce a work of art is to know how to discard the extraneous.
LAURA ESQUIVEL, The Law of Love
For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.
TONI MORRISON, interview with Don Swaim, 1987
There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.
CHARLES DICKENS, Nicholas Nickleby
Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
TOM STOPPARD, "Artist Descending a Staircase"
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
WINSTON CHURCHILL, speech to Royal Academy of Art, 1953
Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.
LEO TOLSTOY, What is Art?
The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for a living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, Man and Superman
Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
THEODOR WIESENGRUND ADORNO, Minima Moralia
- It is the glory and good of Art,
- That Art remains the one way possible
- Of speaking truths, to mouths like mine at least.
ROBERT BROWNING, The Ring and the Book
Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG, NPR interview, Jul. 12, 1974
Realism and art cannot live together.
JENNETTE LEE, The Ibsen Secret
The history of art is the history of revivals.
SAMUEL BUTLER, Note Books
Perhaps there is no other way of reaching some understanding of being than through art? Writers themselves don't analyze what they do; to analyze would be to look down while crossing a canyon on a tightrope. To say this is not to mystify the process of writing but to make an image out of the intense inner concentration the writer must have to cross the chasms of the aleatory and make them the word's own, as an explorer plants a flag.
NADINE GORDIMER, Nobel Lecture, Dec. 7, 1991
All art is political in the sense that it serves someone’s politics.
AUGUST WILSON, The Paris Review, Winter 1999
Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography.
TOM STOPPARD, The Invention of Love
It's not a bad thing for a man to have to live his life--and we nearly all manage to dodge it. Our first round with the Sphinx may strike something out of us--a book or a picture or a symphony; and we're amazed at our feat, and go on letting that first work breed others, as some animal forms reproduce each other without renewed fertilization. So there we are, committed to our first guess at the riddle; and our works look as like as successive impressions of the same plate, each with the lines a little fainter; whereas they ought to be--if we touch earth between times--as different from each other as those other creatures--jellyfish, aren't they, of a kind?--where successive generations produce new forms, and it takes a zoologist to see the hidden likeness.
EDITH WHARTON, "The Legend," Taled of Men and Ghosts
Art is a jealous mistress.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON, Conduct of Life
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, quoted in The Wordsworth Dictionary of Quotations
All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
OSCAR WILDE, The Picture of Dorian Gray
- All passes. Art alone
- Enduring stays to us;
- The Bust outlasts the throne,--
- The Coin, Tiberius.
HENRY AUSTIN DOBSON, Ars Victrix
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