Quotes about Art

If I cannot see evidence of incarnation in a painting of a bridge in the rain by Hokusai, a book by Chaim Potok or Isaac Bashevis Singer, music by Bloch or Bernstein, then I will miss its significance in an Annunciation by Franciabigio, the final chorus of the St. Matthew Passion , the words of a sermon by John Donne.

In worldly terms, she was totally innocent; Eve before the fall, with no knowledge of good and evil. She made one realize how necessary the Fall was; without it, there would have been no human drama, and so no literature, no art, no suffering, no religion, no laughter, no joy, no sin and no redemption. Only camera work (towards which Mrs. Dobbs's painting was reaching) and sociology (which her sister, Beatrice Webb, may be said to have invented).

You don't write for success. That takes part of your attention away from the writing. If you're really doing it, that's all you're doing: writing.

Life is a stage: perform your masterpiece.

The true art of memory, is the art of attention

which has the power or quality of adding. The additory fiction gives to a great man a larger share of reputation than belongs to him, to enable him to serve some good end or purpose.Arbuthnot'sArt of political Lying.

Affection is the lively representment of any passion whatsoever, as if the figures stood not upon a cloth or board, but as if they were acting upon a stage.Wotton'sArchitecture.

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry, and Porcelaine.

The whole Epistle is so methodical, that even its very beginning is framed according to the rules of art.

The Lord, however, not only forbids any image of himself to be erected by a statuary, but to be formed by any artist whatever, because every such image is sinful and insulting to his majesty.

For I am every dead thing,In whom love wrought new alchemy.For his art did expressA quintessence even from nothingness,From dull privations, and lean emptinessHe ruin'd me, and I am re-begotOf absence, darkness, death; things which are not.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.