A Quotes
Browse famous quotes beginning with A. This page is a child index of the full Popular Quotes A-Z directory.
“Art, if it can be ascribed value, is most valuable when its beauty (and the beauty of the truth it tells) bewilders, confounds, defies evil itself; it does so by making what has been unmade; it subverts the spirit of the age; it mends the heart by whispering mysteries the mind alone can’t fathom; it fulfills its highest calling when into all the clamor of Hell it tells the unbearable, beautiful, truth that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. None of these songs and stories matter if the beauty they’re adding to isn’t the kind of beauty that redeems and reclaims.”
“Art, if it is art, will develop in whatever circumstances it is placed.”
Source: The White Shield
“Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God.”
Source: PS -- of Course: Patrick Swift, 1927-1983
“Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation.”
“Art, if it is successful, needs no explanation. Star Trek and Spock, if they are works of art, can be discussed. But finally the response comes in individual terms. Each viewer sees what is there for him, depending on his frame of reference.”
“Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach man humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.”
Source: Mr. Maugham Himself
“Art, if one employs this term in the broad sense that includes poetry within its realm, is an art of creation laden with ideals, located at the very core of the life of a people, defining the spiritual and moral shape of that life.”
Source: Essential Turgenev
“Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice.”
Source: The Manifesto of Futurism
“Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.”
“Art, in other words, betrays a sexy mental fitness.”
“Art, in the widest sense of the word, is the instrument Hellenism has used and would use for that purpose. All the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visual arts, the theatre, must work singly and together to create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, the free man.”
“Art, indeed, began with abstraction.”
Source: The Eternal Present: The beginnings of art
“Art, industry, and commerce, so long crushed and overborne, were stirring into renewed life, and a crowd of adventurous men, nurtured in war and incapable of repose, must seek employment for their restless energies in fields of peaceful enterprise.”
Source: Pioneers of France in the New World
“Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.”
Source: Willa Cather On Writing
“Art, it seems to me, should simplify.”
Source: A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays
“Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline's breathing.”
Source: The Thirteenth Tale: A Novel
“Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”
“Art, like Nature, has her monsters”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings
“Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.”
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings
“Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all, they have the same enemy, sterility.”
Source: The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction
“Art, music, and philosophy are merely poignant examples of what we might have been had not the priests and traders gotten hold of us.”
Source: Brain Droppings
“art, n. This word has no definition.”
Source: The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World
“ART, n. This word has no definition. Its origin is related by the ingenious Father Gassalasca Jape as "One day a wag - what would the wretch be at? Shifted a letter of the cipher RAT, And said it was a god's name! . . ."”
Source: Ambrose Bierce: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs: The Devil's Dictionary, Tales, and Memoirs
“Art, not less eloquently than literature, teaches her children to venerate the single eye. Remember Matsys. His representations of miser-life are breathing. A forfeited bond twinkles in the hard smile. But follow him to an altar-piece. His Apostle has caught a stray tint from his usurer. Features of exquisite beauty are seen and loved; but the old nature of avarice frets under the glow of devotion. Pathos staggers on the edge of farce.”
Source: Pleasures,objects and advantages of literature
“Art, not unlike raising children... may entail much sacrifice and periods of despair, but, with luck, the effort will produce something that outlives you.”
“Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.”
Source: On writers and writing
“Art, science, philosophy, religion -- each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.”
Source: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness
“Art, that great undogmatized church.”
“Art, to me is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain. The word 'Impressionism' as applied to art has been abused, and in the general acceptance of the term has become perverted. [...] The true impressionism is realism. So many people do not observe. They take the ready-made axioms laid down by others, and walk blindly in a rut without trying to see for themselves.”
“Art, to me, is a question. It should never be an answer.”
“Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain.”
Source: Childe Hassam: American impressionist
“Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.”
“Art, we are told, is a criterion of one's taste. How humiliating, should our taste turn out to be bad. Rather as though we were caught stark naked with a poor figure.”
Source: Free Admission
“Art, well good art at least, takes you to a place you go during the experience of it, and then after you experience it you are different.”
“Art, when destroyed can never be replaced, yet history repeats itself.”
“Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.”
“Art- speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day and that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day, and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.”
Source: Studies in Classic American Literature
“Art-making is an extension of the kind of spiritual process that shamans unfold in order to demonstrate the connectedness of the world beyond reality.”
“Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.”
“Art-making is not about telling the truth but making the truth felt”
“Art-school girls are very nice.”
“Art. Its definitions are legion, its meanings multitudinous, its importance often debated. But amid the many contradictory definitions of art, one has always stood the test of time, from the Upanishads in the East, to Michelangelo in the West: art is the perception and depiction of the sublime, the transcendent, the beautiful, the spiritual.”
“Art... can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations.”
“Art... does not take kindly to facts, is helpless to grapple with theories, and is killed outright by a sermon.”
Source: Points of View
“Art... reacts to or reflects the culture it springs from.”
Source: I’m Black When I’m Singing, I’m Blue When I Ain’t and Other Plays
“Art...is the intentional act of using your humanity to create a change in another person...Passion is caring enough about your art that you will do almost anything to give it away, to make it a gift, to change people.”
“Art...must do something more than give pleasure: it should relate to our own life so as to increase our energy of spirit.”
“Art: to nudge truth along a little.”
Source: The journal of Jules Renard
“Art? That's a man's name.”
“Arta de a scrie, pentru mine, înseamnă arta de a exista de nenumărate ori, în fel şi chipuri.”