Works Of Art Quotes - Page 4

• Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Art, Work, Philosophical

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2016). “101 Facts of life”, p.27, Publishdrive

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• I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

  W. Somerset Maugham

  Beautiful, Art, Book

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• A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.

  Robert Smithson

  Art, World, Surface

  Robert Smithson, Jack D. Flam (1996). “Robert Smithson, the Collected Writings”, p.154, Univ of California Press

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• The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

  Susan Sontag

  Art, Real, Mean

  Susan Sontag (1983). “A Susan Sontag reader”, Vintage

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• I don't think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today. But it's certainly worth a try.

  Steven Spielberg

  Art, Book, Thinking

  "Spielberg: Israel entitled to strong response" by Yitzhak Benhorin, www.ynetnews.com. June 12, 2005.

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• A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.

  Yann Martel

  Art, Real

  Yann Martel (2010). “Beatrice & Virgil”, p.10, Knopf Canada

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• Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen.

  Andrew Wyeth

  Art, Work, Thinking

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• Not all are called to be artists in the specific sense of the term. Yet, as Genesis has it, all men and women are entrusted with the task of crafting their own life: in a certain sense, they are to make of it a work of art, a masterpiece.

  Pope John Paul II

  Art, Men, Tasks

  Letter to artists, w2.vatican.va. April 04, 1999.

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• Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Art, War, Ambition

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• But of works of art little can be said.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Art, Littles, Said

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2014). “Memories, Portraits, Essays and Records (Annotated Edition)”, p.429, Jazzybee Verlag

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• ART Art is that thing having to do only with itself—the product of a successful attempt to make a work of art. Unfortunately, there are no expamples of art, nor good reasons to think that it will ever exist. (Everything that has been made has been made with a purpose, teverything with an end exists outside of that thing, i.e., "I want to sell this", or "I want this to make me famous and loved", or "I want this to make me whole", or worse, "I want this to make others whole.") And yet we continue to write, paint, sculpt and compose. Is this foolish of us?

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Art, Writing, Successful

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• I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself

  Antonin Artaud

  Art, Existence

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• It is hard to think of any work of art of which one can say 'this saved the life of one Jew, one Vietnamese, one Cambodian'. Specific books, perhaps; but as far as one can tell, no paintings or sculptures. The difference between us and the artists of the 1920's is that they they thought such a work of art could be made. Perhaps it was a certain naivete that made them think so. But it is certainly our loss that we cannot.

  Robert Hughes

  Art, Book, Loss

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• To me you are a work of art, and I would give you my heart - that's if I had one.

  Steven Morrissey

  Art, Giving, Ifs

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• Nothing, of course, will ever take the place of the good old fashion of 'liking' a work of art or not liking it; the more improved criticism will not abolish that primitive, that ultimate, test.

  Henry James

  Fashion, Art, Criticism

  Henry James, William Veeder, Susan M. Griffin (1986). “The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and the Practice of Fiction”, p.176, University of Chicago Press

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• Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power...Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.

  Abraham Joshua Heschel

  Art, Deeds, Remember

  Abraham Joshua Heschel (1983). “I Asked for Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology”, Crossroad Publishing Company

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• A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.

  E. M. Forster

  Art, Science, Abandoned

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• In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. This affirmation lies in the way the author takes control of reality by retelling it in his own way, thus creating a new world. Every great work of art, I would declare pompously, is a celebration, an act of insubordination against the betrayals, horrors and infidelities of life. The perfection and beauty of form rebels against the ugliness and shabbiness of the subject matter.

  Azar Nafisi

  Art, Betrayal, Lying

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• But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its soul and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.

  W. E. B. Du Bois

  Art, Sunset, Color

  W. E. B. Du Bois (2011). “Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept”, p.147, Transaction Publishers

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• I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.

  Joris-Karl Huysmans

  Art, People, Wish

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• A great friendship was like a great work of art, he thought. It took time and attention, and a spark of something that was impossible to describe. It was a happy, lucky accident, finding some kindred part of yourself in a total stranger." pg. 287

  Elise Broach

  Art, Lucky, Attention

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• A work of art wastes away and becomes lustreless in surroundings where it has a price but not a value. It radiates only when surrounded by love. It is bound to wilt in a world where the rich have no time and the cultivated no money. But it never harmonizes with borrowed greatness.

  Ernst Junger

  Art, Greatness, World

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• Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

  Virginia Woolf

  Art, Mean, Wool

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.4186, Delphi Classics

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• The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.

  Ezra Pound

  Inspirational, Life, Art

  Ezra Pound (1965). “Ezra Pound perspectives: essays in honor of his eightieth birthday”

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• The heaviest impact of the work of art is in the guts. Art does not reason. It manhandles you and changes you.

  Lawrence Durrell

  Art, Impact, Doe

  Lawrence Durrell (1952). “Key to modern poetry”

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