Art Quotes
More Art Quotes
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)
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”
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
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).
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"
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)
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
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
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)
Remember to be submissive, thou art analien, a fugitive, and in need.
Aeschylus— Supplices, l.202 (translated by H Weir Smyth).
Out of the debris of a statue thoroughly shattered a new art work is born: a naked foot unforgettably resting on a stone; a candid hand; a bent knee which contains all the speed of the foot race; a torso which has no face to prevent us from loving it.
Crayencour— Quoted in the NewYorkTimes,10 May1992.
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.
In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.
Susan Sontag— "Against Interpretation" (1964), p. 14
The syllogism that says "Comics are sequential art, Trajan's column is sequential art, therefore Trajan's column is comics" is such a glaring fallacy that I'm surprised it's gotten this far.
Eddie Campbell— The Graphic Novel Review, interview by Milo George (2004)
Karanth made Yakshagana more popular through the ballet adaptation of the art.
— Prof B A Vivek Rai in . Deccan herald. 11 October 2013. Retrieved on 19 January 2014.
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).
There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
cyril connolly— 1938 Enemies of Promise, ch.14.
My canvas soothes me into forgetfulness of the scene of turmoil and folly — and worse — of the scene around me. Every gleam of sunshine is blighted to me in the art at least. Can it therefore be wondered at that I paint continual storms? "Tempest o'er tempest roll'd" — still the "darkness" is majestic.
john constable— Letter to C.R. Leslie (1834), John Constable's Correspondence, ed. R.B. Beckett, (Ipswich, Suffolk Records Society, 1962-1970), vol. 3, p. 122; also quoted in Hugh Honour, Romanticism (Westview Press, 1979, ISBN 0-064-30089-7), ch. 3, p. 91
To become truly immortal a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken it will enter the regions of childhood vision and dream.
giorgio de chirico— 'On Mystery and Creation', Giorgio de Chirico, Paris 1913, as quoted in "Letters of the great artists – from Ghiberti to Gainsborough", Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson , London, 1963, p . 231
My area of research is something that in all fairness has no practical usability whatsoever and the thing is I'm often asked to apologize for that. It is interesting to me that people ask 'what's the point of doing that if it's not useful?' But they never ask that, or do they very rarely ask that about art or literature or music. Those things are not gonna produce a better toaster.
lawrence m. krauss— YouTube video
Folk music is not so much a body of art as it is a process, an attitude, and a way of life; its distinguishing features lie not within the songs themselves, but in the relations of those songs to a folk culture.
sam hinton— "The Singer of Folk Songs and His Conscience"
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.
It [Kathak] is a different art form, where there is more of abhinaya.
— In Quotes. Narthaki.com. Retrieved on 17 January 2014.
art, industry, and commerce, so long crushed and overborne, were stirring into renewed life, and a crowd of adventurous men, nurtured in war and incapable of repose, must seek employment for their restless energies in fields of peaceful enterprise.
francis parkman— Pt. II, Ch. 2
Riches and art are spurious receipts for the production of Happiness and Beauty .
George Bernard Shaw— #104. (Maxims for Revolutionists (1903))
