Works Of Art Quotes - Page 30

• If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.

  Allan Nevins

  Art, Past, Ideas

  Allan Nevins (1975). “Allan Nevins on history”

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• A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Unique, People

  Oscar Wilde (1969). “The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde”, p.270, University of Chicago Press

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• The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

  Oscar Wilde

  Art, Art Is, Spectators

  Oscar Wilde (2013). “The Essential Oscar Wilde”, p.344, Simon and Schuster

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• Every work of art is a trick by which the artist manipulates appearances.

  Edmund Wilson

  Art, Appearance, Tricks

  Edmund Wilson (1951). “Memoirs of Hecate County”

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• The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them - especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are.

  Daniel Dennett

  Art, Mistake, Mind

  Daniel C. Dennett (2014). “Intuition Pumps And Other Tools for Thinking”, p.22, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Beautiful, Art, Character

  1841 Essays: First Series,'Art'.

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• Gene Wolfe has produced a work of art that can satisfy adult appetites and in which even the most fantastical elements register as poetry rather than as penny-whistle whimsy.

  Thomas M. Disch

  Art, Adults, Elements

  Thomas M. Disch (2005). “On SF”, p.141, University of Michigan Press

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• I don't see why escapist literature shouldn't also be a work of art.

  P. D. James

  Art, Literature, Escapists

  P. D. James (2011). “Time to Be in Earnest”, p.28, Faber & Faber

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• The fact that there are so many weak, poor and boring stories and novels written and published in America has been ascribed by our rebels to the horrible squareness of our institutions, the idiocy of power, the debasement of sexual instincts, and the failure of writers to be alienated enough. The poems and novels of these same rebellious spirits, and their theoretical statements, are grimy and gritty and very boring too, besides being nonsensical, and it is evident by now that polymorphous sexuality and vehement declarations of alienation are not going to produce great works of art either.

  Saul Bellow

  Art, America, Poetry

  Saul Bellow (2015). “There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction”, p.149, Penguin

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• The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

  Bernard Berenson

  Art, Helping, Justification

  Bernard Berenson (1958). “Essays in Appreciation”

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• For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

  Joyce Cary

  Art, Hard Work, Essentials

  Joyce Cary (1961). “Art and reality: ways of the creative process”

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• Some of our most powerful works of art have been produced by older Americans-by hands that have engaged in years of hard work, eyes that have witnessed decades of change, and hearts that have felt a lifetime of emotions. Our whole society benefits when older Americans use their talents and experiences to become involved in the arts as creators, teachers, mentors, volunteers, and audiences.

  Hillary Clinton

  Teacher, Art, Powerful

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• No work of art is ever completed, it is only abandoned.

  Paul Valery

  Art, Abandoned, Art Is

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• Every major work of art is a transgression, but the artist is not necessarily, by nature, a transgressor.

  E. L. Doctorow

  Art, Transgression, Majors

  E.L. Doctorow (2011). “Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:: Selected Essays, 1977-1992”, p.41, Random House

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• Jed Perl writes precisely and ecstatically. Antoine' s Alphabet is a history and a fairy tale, a work of criticism, and a work of art.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Art, Writing, Criticism

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• It is only with the best judges that the highest works of art would lose none of their honor by being seen in their rudiments.

  John Frederick Boyes

  Art, Judging, Honor

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• You are always looking for already-felt emotions, just as you like to get an old pair of trousers back from the cleaners, which seem new when you don't look too closely. Artists are cleaners, don't let yourself be taken in by them. True modern works of art are made not by artists but quite simply by men.

  Francis Picabia

  Art, Taken, Men

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• When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art.

  Jane Jacobs

  Art, Cities, Done

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.372, Vintage

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• Men's bodies are our women's works of art. Given to us power of control, we will never carelessly throw them in to fill up the gaps in human relationships made by international ambitions and greeds ... War will pass when intellectual culture and activity have made possible to the female an equal share in the governance of modern national life; it will probably not pass away much sooner; its extinction will not be delayed much longer.

  Olive Schreiner

  Art, War, Ambition

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• Poetry is not an end in itself but in the service of life; of what use are poems, or any other works of art, unless to enable human lives to be lived with insight of a deeper kind, with more sensitive feelings, more intense sense of the beautiful, with deeper understanding?

  Kathleen Raine

  Beautiful, Art, Understanding

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• A hen's egg is, quite simply, a work of art, a masterpiece of design and construction with, it has to be said, brilliant packaging!

  Delia Smith

  Art, Food, Eggs

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• Each good thought that you have encouraged and nourished is your life's true work of art.

  Sri Chinmoy

  Motivational, Art, Good Thoughts

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• Nothing compares to pizza, and you discover and rediscover it when you are much too old, and you have got too much cholesterol and triglycerides...A collector is someone who is ready to devour the work of art that he wants to possess at all costs.

  Augusto De Luca

  Art, Cost, Want

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• it is possible to study fashion the way one can study a work of art, so that it reflects significantly upon the issues and conflicts of its own day.

  Kim Chernin

  Fashion, Art, Issues

  Kim Chernin (1982). “The obsession: reflections on the tyranny of slenderness”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• What I've always seen in writers and artists is the courage it takes to make an original work of art. I think the real risks in literature are linguistic and intellectual, and I hope we can highlight those, as well as political courage.

  Salman Rushdie

  Art, Real, Thinking

  Source: lareviewofbooks.org

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