Quotes on the arts

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.
Oscar Wilde

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
Oscar Wilde

All art is but imitation of nature.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
Albert Camus

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.’ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’
Edgar Allan Poe

Art is not a thing; it is a way.
Elbert Hubbard

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
Albert Einstein

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
Steven Pinker

Art evokes emotion. It doesn’t have to be a thing of beauty.
Eli Broad

Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.
Jessamyn West

I think in art, but especially in films, people are trying to confirm their own existences.
Jim Morrison

Art is the proper task of life.
Friedrich Nietzsche

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.
Andy Warhol

The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
Thomas Mann

Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression.
Arthur Erickson

Art is science made clear.
Wilson Mizner

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree.
Albert Einstein

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.
Pablo Picasso

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don’t dare reveal.
Elia Kazan

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.
John Ruskin

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.
Edward Steichen

I do not literally paint that table, but the emotion it produces upon me.
Henri Matisse

Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.
Novalis

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.
D. H. Lawrence

I’ve handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one.
Josef Albers
 
For thousands of years art was seen as a source of responsible moral and ethical leadership. Today, taking that stance is almost seen as comic.
Jack Beal
 
Art itself is essentially ethical; because every true work of art must have a beauty or grandeur of some kind, and beauty and grandeur cannot be comprehended by the beholder except through the moral sentiment. The eye is only a witness; it is not a judge. The mind judges what the eye reports to it; therefore, whatever elevates the moral sentiment to the contemplation of beauty and grandeur is in itself ethical.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
 
In a world that has ceased to believe in sin, the artist is responsible for the preaching.
Albert Camus
 
If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.
Albrecht Durer
 
What is beautiful is moral; that is all there is to it.
Gustave Flaubert

The laws of morals and the laws of music are the same.
Zoltan Kodaly

I consider morals and aesthetics one and the same, for they cover only one impulse, one drive inherent in our consciousness – to bring our life and all our actions into a satisfactory relationship with the events of the world as our consciousness wants it to be, in harmony with our life and according to the laws of consciousness itself.
Naum Gabo
 
The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
 
As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.
The Goncourt brothers
 
The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.
Norman Mailer
 
Art is never chaste. We forbid it to the ignorant innocents, never allow a contact with those not sufficiently prepared. Yes art is dangerous, and if it is chaste it isn’t art.
Pablo Picasso
 
It is ridiculous to say that art has nothing to do with morality. What is true is that the artist’s business is not that of the policeman.
George Bernard Shaw
 
Art is amoral; so is life. For me there are no obscene pictures or books; there are only poorly conceived and poorly executed ones.
Irving Stone
 
The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.
Oscar Wilde

Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.
Herbie Hancock
 
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.
Georgia O’Keeffe
 
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
Pablo Picasso
 
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
 
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
Honore de Balzac
 
Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation’s picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man’s only lasting monument.
William Morris Hunt
 
Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain – not falsification, but a shifting.
Gunter Grass

Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.
Vladimir Nabokov
 
All fiction relies on the real world in the sense that we all take in the world through our five senses and we accumulate details, consciously or subconsciously. This accumulation of detail can be drawn on when you write fiction.
Rohinton Mistry

Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.
Herbie Hancock
 
I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.
Georgia O’Keeffe
 
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
Pablo Picasso
 
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
Aldous Huxley
 
If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
Honore de Balzac
 
Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation’s picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man’s only lasting monument.
William Morris Hunt
 
Everybody knows how fallible memory can sometimes be. You remember certain fragments precisely, but as soon as you try to join the fragments together, for a story, there is a certain – not falsification, but a shifting.
Gunter Grass
 
I’m interested in memory because it’s a filter through which we see our lives, and because it’s foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
Kazuo Ishiguro

There was a time when meanings were focused and reality could be fixed; when that sort of belief disappeared, things became uncertain and open to interpretation.
Bridget Riley

The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
Richard Avedon
 
Imagination and fiction make up more than three quarters of our real life.
Simone Weil

My painting carries with it the message of pain.
Frida Kahlo

I never paint dreams or nightmares. I paint my own reality.
Frida Kahlo

Literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourses of my book friends. They talk to me without embarrassment or awkwardness.
Helen Keller

The artist’s job is to be a witness to his time in history.
Robert Rauschenberg

To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there’s no such thing as perfect.
Alexander Calder

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.
Marshall McLuhan

Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.
Andre Maurois

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.
W. G. Sebald

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
Jonathan Swift

Literature becomes the living memory of a nation.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Whoever neglects the arts when he is young has lost the past and is dead to the future.
Sophocles

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.
Georgia O’Keefe

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.
Michelangelo

The imagination imitates. It is the critical spirit that creates.
Oscar Wilde

Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.
Ludwig van Beethoven

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.
Arthur Erickson

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.
Tom Stoppard

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.
Henry Miller

In art as in love, instinct is enough.
Anatole France