Art Quotes
More Art Quotes
It's sad that the art form is not appreciated in its place of origin, Lucknow, despite being popular across the globe.
Birju Maharaj— “Kathak faces fusion challenge”
The private ownership of great art, its seclusion from the general view of men and women, let alone from that of interested amateurs and scholars, is a curious business. The literal disappearance of a Turner or a Van Gogh into some Middle Eastern or Latin-American bank vault to be kept as investment and collateral, the sardonic decision of a Greek shipping tycoon to put an incomparable El Greco on his yacht, where it hangs at persistent risk — these are phenomena that verge on vandalism.
George Steiner— "The Cleric of Treason"
Cicero is hardly to be reckoned ...for he delighted so much more in the practice, than in the theory, of his art, that he is perpetually drawn off from the rigid philosophical analysis of its principles, into discursive declamations, always eloquent indeed, and often highly interesting, but adverse to regularity of system, and frequently as unsatisfactory to the practical student as to the Philosopher.
Richard Whately— Elements of Rhetoric, Introduction (1828, p. 19)
Biological determinism, to paraphrase the great literary critic Roberto Schwarz, is a socially necessary illusion well-grounded in appearance. Much like art and literature, science "is historically shaped and? ... ?registers the social process to which it owes its existence." Scientists inherit the prejudices of the societies in which they live and work. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the modern incarnation of biological determinism with its decidedly neoliberal assumptions about humans and societies.
— Pankaj Mehta, There's a gene for that, Jacobin, February 2014
The single greatest influence on my work as a filmmaker has been the celebrated Interviews with Francis Bacon (1980) by David Sylvester. Sylvester is a master of the art of complicity: he knows how to manipulate and exploit it. Complicity requires being cautiously intellectual yet profoundly human in the sense that the interviewer must act as the concerned midwife, allowing the interviewee to express himself while at the same time guiding his thoughts to a satisfactory conclusion through sensitive provocation.
damian pettigrew— On Fellini’s favorite directors
A writer and, I believe, generally all persons must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.
jorge luis borges— Jorge Luis Borges, Twenty Conversations with Borges, Including a Selection of Poems : Interviews by Roberto Alifano, 1981–1983 (1984)
Far from affording artists continuous inspiration, mass-media sources for art have become a dead end. They have combined with the abstractness of institutional art teaching to produce a fine-arts culture given over to information and not experience. This faithfully echoes the drain of concreteness from modern existence— the reign of mere unassimilated data instead of events that gain meaning by being absorbed into the fabric of imaginative life.
robert hughes— "Introduction: The Decline of the City of Mahagonny"
Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men.
jesus christ— The Gospel of Matthew 16:23 (KJV), said to Peter.
Disability is not a brave struggle or ‘courage in the face of adversity.’ Disability is an art. It’s an ingenious way to live.
— w:Neil Marcus, Storm Reading, 1993, quoted in p 23 Making an entrance: theory and practice for disabled and non-disabled dancers By Adam Benjamin
Remember to be submissive, thou art analien, a fugitive, and in need.
Aeschylus— Supplices, l.202 (translated by H Weir Smyth).
My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not saya literal God? But thou art also?a figurative, a metaphorical God too.
john donne— 1624 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Expostulation19,'The Language of God'.
His imperial fancy has laid all Nature under tribute, and has collected riches from every scene of the creation and every walk of art.
robert hall— On Burke; Apology for the Freedom of the Press, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art which is art.
joseph conrad— chap. 7 (The Mirror of the Sea (1906))
It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.
wolfgang amadeus mozart— Spoken in Prague, 1787, to conductor Kucharz, who led the rehearsals for Don Giovanni, from Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words by Friedrich Kerst, trans. Henry Edward Krehbiel (1906)
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
Susan Sontag— "Against Interpretation" (1964), p. 14
Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.
don marquis— Don Marquis, archy and mehitabel (1927), "certain maxims of archy"
Variant translation of Inventas aut qui vitam excoluere per artis : "It is of benefit to have improved life through discovered knowledge "; a paraphrase of this is inscribed on the Medicine and Physiology Nobel prize medals: Inventas vitam iuvat excoluisse per artes ("inventions enhance life which is beautified through art").
— The souls that throng the flood
Are those to whom, by Fate, are other bodies owed,
In Lethe's lake they long oblivion taste,
Of future life secure, forgetful of the past.
— Lines 713–715 (translated by John Dryden).
art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.
andrei tarkovsky— p. 113 (Sculpting in Time (1986))
And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto thee, and to thy seed after thee. And I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.
Bible (Old Testament)— Genesis 17:7-8 (KJV)
Nature meant me A wife, a silly, harmless, household dove, Fond without art, and kind without deceit; But Fortune, that has made a mistress of me, Has thrust me out to the wide world, unfurnish'd Of falsehood to be happy.
john dryden— 1678 Cleopatra. All for Love,or The World Well Lost, act 4.
The great Christian art did not die because all possible forms had been used up; it died because faith was being transformed into piety. Now, the same conquest of the outside world that brought in our modern individualism, so different from that of the Renaissance, is by way of relativizing the individual. It is plain to see that man's faculty of transformation, which began by a remaking of the natural world, has ended by calling man himself into question.
andré malraux— Les voix du silence [Voices of Silence] (1951), Part IV, Chapter VI
A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art. ... The first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear. There will be no art that might not just as well be advertisement.
gilbert keith chesterton— p. 6 (The Great Minimum)
No command of art, No toil, can help you hear; Earth's minstrelsy falls clear But on the listening heart.
— John Vance Cheney, The Listening Heart.
Marketing is the art of making something seem better than it really is.
— Suso Banderas (1976- ), Randomsig sample sigquotes (2000)
art pales when compared to the workings of nature.
StThomas Aquinas— c.1272 Summa Theologia, bk. 3, question 66, article 4.
