Quotes on Art

In a sense, as we are creative beings, our lives become our work of art.

Words are the physicians of a mind diseased.

The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities.

I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things. As far as I can conjecture the art consists in habitually searching for the causes and meaning of everything which occurs.

However, they have not acquired a perfect mastery of the art of lying; they lie so clumsily and ineptly that anyone who is just a little observant can easily detect it. But for us Christians they stand as a terrifying example of God's wrath.

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

An intelligent hell would be better than a stupid paradise.

As hypocrisy is said to be the highest compliment to virtue, the art of lying is the strongest acknowledgment of the force of truth.

To say a compliment well is a high art and few possess it.

Experience is in the fingers and head. The heart is inexperienced.

The secret of contentment is the realization that life is a gift, not a right. Next to faith this is the highest art - to be content with the calling in which God has placed you.

The arts must study their occasions; they must stand modestly aside until they can slip in fitly into the interstices of life.

The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows it to realize its supreme purpose through him.

Man can find no better retreat from the world than art, and man can find no stronger link with the world than art.

It is the great privilege of poverty to be happy unenvied, to be healthful without physic, and secure without a guard; to obtain from the bounty of nature, what the great and wealthy are compelled to procure by the help of artists and attendants, of flatterers and spies.

Of all man's works of art, a cathedral is greatest. A vast and majestic tree is greater than that.

No work of art ever puts forward views. Views belong to people who are not artists.

Politics is the art of making your selfish desires seem like the national interest.

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light.

Shall I compare thee to a summer day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate... When in eternal lines to time thou growst So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.