Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.
ANAIS NIN, The Journals of Anais Nin
Art knows, life applies knowledge; art feels, life acts.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Aesthetic culture is not the high-road to all the virtues, and, indeed, certain of the vices have been known to infest it. Neither, on the other hand, is there any special grace in ugliness. Art is only utterance. It must express something; and the vital question is, what does it express?
LEWIS FOREMAN DAY, Everyday Art
Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.
VIRGINIA WOOLF, attributed, Languages of Art
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 civilisation, 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
Artists recognize other artists as soon as the pencil begins to move.
DAN SIMMONS, The Rise of Endymion
Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
The artist is justified by his art.
LEWIS FOREMAN DAY, Stained Glass
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his pictures.
HENRY WARD BEECHER, Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit
The worst evil which can befall the artist is that his work should appear good in his own eyes.
LEONARDO DA VINCI, Thoughts on Art and Life
True art consists in the concealment of art.
Art is awkward until technique has become an unconscious habit.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
It used to happen, and still happens, to me to take no pleasure in a work of art at the first sight of it, because it is too much for me; but if I suspect any merit in it, I try to get at it; and then I never fail to make the most gratifying discoveries--to find new qualities in the work itself and new faculties in myself.
JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe
Art is one of man's few serious activities.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
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
Truth as philosophy is a gas; as art, it is visible steam.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
An artist in my view is always afraid of extremists; he is always afraid of those who claim to have found the ultimate solution to any question.
CHINUA ACHEBE, The Massachusetts Review, Summer, 1987
The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved--if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.
ROBERT A. HEINLEIN, Stranger in a Strange Land
The swing of art is circular, from form to formalism, from formalism to formlessness, from formlessness to form again.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Art is the concrete artifact of faith and expectation, the realization of a world that would otherwise be little more than a veil of pointless consciousness stretched over a gulf of mystery.
The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
The difference between Art and Life is that Art is more bearable.
CHARLES BUKOWSKI, Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Art functions pyramidally: all new achievements are based on the utilization of everything that has been accumulated below, at the foundations of the pyramid. Revolutions do not occur here; this field, more than any other, is governed by evolution. And we must know what has been done before us in the field of verbal art. This does not mean that you must follow in trodden paths: you must contribute something of your own. A work of art is of value only when it is original, both in content and in form. But in order to leap upward, it is necessary to take off from the ground. It is essential that there be a ground.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN, The Psychology of Creative Work
- Art is the child of Nature; yes,
- Her darling child, in whom we trace
- The features of the mother's face,
- Her aspect and her attitude,
- All her majestic loveliness
- Chastened and softened and subdued
- Into a more attractive grace,
- And with a human sense imbued.
- He is the greatest artist, then,
- Whether of pencil or of pen,
- Who follows Nature.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, Kéramos
The only original part in a work of art is the infusion of the artist's own character, if he has one.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY, Keystones of Thought
Art has to reveal to us ideas, formless spiritual essences. The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring. The painting of Gustave Moreau is the painting of ideas. The deepest poetry of Shelley, the words of Hamlet bring our mind into contact with the eternal wisdom, Plato's world of ideas. All the rest is the speculation of schoolboys for schoolboys.
There's nothing like drawing a thing to make you really see it.
MARGARET ATWOOD, The Year of the Flood
I say that the true artist-seer, the heavenly fool who can and does produce beauty, is mainly dazzled to death by his own scruples, the blinding shapes and colors of his own sacred human conscience.
J. D. SALINGER, "Seymour: An Introduction"
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