Quotes on Art

It is not enough to place colors, however beautiful, one beside the other; colors must also react on one another. Otherwise, you have cacophony.

High horns, low horns, silence, and finally a pandemonium of trumpets, rattles, croaks, and cries that almost shakes the bog with its nearness ... A new day has begun on the crane marsh. A sense of time lies thick and heavy on such a place ... Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they intrust the management of their affairs; but it does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion or to every transient impulse which the people may receive from the arts of men, who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.

What art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern; the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men, the useful has succeeded to the beautiful.

Art must be an expression of love or it is nothing.

Beautiful forms and compositions are not made by chance, nor can they ever, in any material, be made at small expense. A composition for cheapness and not excellence of workmanship is the most frequent and certain cause of the rapid decay and entire destruction of arts and manufacturers.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Love always brings difficulties, that is true, but the good side of it is that it gives energy.

If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.

I view my hair and clothes as functional art.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

It's important as a writer to do my art well and do it in a way that is powerful and beautiful and meaningful, so that my work regenerates the people, certainly Indian people, and the earth and the sun. And in that way we all continue forever.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

Obsession is beautiful. It's what makes art.

An essential element of any art is risk. If you don't take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn't been seen before?

It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never peril.

There’s a real question as to what beauty is and why it’s important to us. Many pseudo-philosophers try to answer these questions and tell us they’re not really answerable. I draw on art and literature, and music in particular, because music is a wonderful example of something that’s in this world but not of this world. Great works of music speak to us from another realm even though they speak to us in ordinary physical sounds.