Quotes about Art

Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.

Art is not a gift which a few people are given, but rather it is a gift which most people throw away.

If I could meet Rembrandt right where he had painted father and son, God and humanity, compassion and misery, in one circle of love, I would come to know as much as I ever would about death and life. I also sensed the hope that through Rembrandt's masterpiece I would one day be able to express what I most wanted to say about love.

I looked at the splendid drawings and paintings Rembrandt created in the midst of all his setbacks, disillusionment and grief. One must have died many deaths and cried many tears to have painted a portrait of God in such humility.

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

The Vedas say, All intelligences awake with the morning. Poetry and art, and the fairest and most memorable of the actions of men, date from such an hour. All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise.

An artist is first an amateur.

We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agri-culture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

A good book is the plectrum with which our else silent lyres are struck.

A noble craft, but somehow a most melancholy! All noble things are touched with that.

There is no blue without yellow and without orange.