Art Quotes - Page 27

• Art never improves, but... the material of art is never quite the same.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art Is, Materials

  T. S. Eliot (1998). “The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays”, p.29, Courier Corporation

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• Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

  Robert Frost

  Philosophy, Writing, Ice

  Collected Poems (1939) "Figure a Poem Makes"

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• To be an artist means never to avert one's eyes.

  Akira Kurosawa

  Mean, Eye, Avert

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• The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men.

  Albert Einstein

  Beautiful, Death, God

  Quoted in Philipp Frank Einstein: His Life and Times (1947), ch.12, section 5.

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• Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.

  Walter Pater

  Giving, Quality, Moments

  1873 'Conclusion' in Studies in the History of the Renaissance.

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• Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Nature, Science, Born

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• I have always sought to be understood and, while I was taken to task by critics or colleagues, I thought they were right, assuming I had not been clear enough to be understood. This assumption allowed me to work my whole life without hatred and even without bitterness toward criticism, regardless of its source. I counted solely on the clarity of expression of my work to gain my ends. Hatred, rancor, and the spirit of vengeance are useless baggage to the artist. His road is difficult enough for him to cleanse his soul of everything which could make it more so.

  Henri Matisse

  Taken, Expression, Hatred

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• I have learned that what I have not drawn I have never really seen, and that when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.

  Frederick Franck

  Drawing, Miracle, Ordinary

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• Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

  Milan Kundera

  Beauty, Matter, Ends

  "James Joyce, the Citizen and the Artist". Book by Charles Peake, 1977.

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• Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.

  Agnes Repplier

  Doe, Facts, Theory

  Agnes Repplier (1891). “Points of View”, Boston Houghton, Mifflin 1893.

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• The function of Art is to disturb. Science reassures.

  Georges Braque

  Function, Art Is

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• Each painting has its own way of evolving. When the painting is finished, the subject reveals itself.

  William Baziotes

  Way, Painting, Evolve

  William Baziotes, Michael Preble (1988). “William Baziotes: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1952-1961 : 7 March-31 March, 1984”

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• The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread, and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance. He must live to paint and not paint to live.

  Albert Pinkham Ryder

  Giving, Needs, Bread

  Quoted in Sherman Albert Pinkham Ryder (1920).

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• Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel like painting, but when I see a Rembrandt I feel like giving up!

  Max Liebermann

  Giving Up, Painting, Feels

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• The big artist .. . keeps a sharp eye on Nature and steals her tools.

  Thomas Eakins

  Eye, Tools, Stealing

  "Thomas Eakins: artist of Philadelphia".

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• The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art.

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

  Nature, Counterfeit Money, Counterparts

  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, J. D. McClatchy (2000). “Poems and Other Writings”, p.645, Library of America

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• Is love like art - something always ahead, never quite attained.

  Edward Weston

  Never Quit

  Edward Weston, Nancy Newhall (1990). “The daybooks of Edward Weston”

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• I'm never really sure what that word means, but however inaccurately I use it, 'classical' was always my ideal, as long as I can remember, and something of that has always stayed with me, to this day. Of course, there were difficulties, because in comparison to my ideal, I didn't even come close.

  Gerhard Richter

  Mean, Long, Use

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• Art neither belongs to religion, nor to ethics; but, like these, it brings us nearer to the Infinite, one of the forms of which it manifests to us. God is the source of all beauty, as of all truth, of all religion, of all morality. The most exalted object, therefore, of art is to reveal in its own manner the sentiment of the Infinite.

  Victor Cousin

  Ethics, Morality, Infinite

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• While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual and the sublime are suspect today, I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art.

  Ian Hornak

  Beautiful, Spiritual, Sublime

  Cover Magazine, 1994.

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• A work of art is said to be perfect in proportion as it does not remind the spectator of the process by which it was created.

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman

  Perfect, Doe, Process

  Henry Theodore Tuckerman (1850). “The optimist”, p.18

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• Light is impressionism.

  Gae Aulenti

  Light, Impressionism

  Time, December 8, 1986.

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• The misfortune in the state is, that nobody can enjoy life in peace, but that everybody must govern; and in art, that nobody will enjoy what has been produced, but that every one wants to reproduce on his own account.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Enjoy Life, Want, States

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Peter Eckermann (2014). “Conversations of Goethe with Johann Peter Eckermann”, p.141, Ravenio Books

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• All the arts, which have a tendency to raise man in the scale of being, have a certain common band of union, and are connected, if I may be allowed to say so, by blood-relationship with one another.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Men, Blood, Band

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• The highest art is always the most religious; and the greatest artist is always a devout man. A scoffing Raphael or Michael Angelo is not conceivable.

  John Stuart Blackie

  Religious, Men, Scoffing

  John Stuart Blackie (1858). “On beauty: three discourses delivered in the University of Edinburgh”, p.104

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