Quotes on Art

Cooking is one of the oldest arts and one which has rendered us the most important service in civic life.

One does not need buildings, money, power, or status to practice the Art of Peace. Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to train.

Life is growth. If we stop growing, technically and spiritually, we are as good as dead. The Art of Peace is a celebration of the bonding of heaven, earth, and humankind. It is all that is true, good, and beautiful.

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

Design has to work. Art does not.

A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.

The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical.

True literacy is becoming an arcane art, and the nation is steadily "dumbing down."

I am no longer afraid of becoming lost, because the journey back always reveals something new, and that is ultimately good for the artist.

I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

No one is an artist unless he carries his picture in his head before painting it, and is sure of his method and composition.

At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

The construction of Europe is an art. It is the art of the possible.

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

Ordering a man to write a poem is like commanding a pregnant woman to give birth to a red-headed child.

Gradually, ... the aspect of science as knowledge is being thrust into the background by the aspect of science as the power of manipulating nature. It is because science gives us the power of manipulating nature that it has more social importance than art. Science as the pursuit of truth is the equal, but not the superior, of art. Science as a technique, though it may have little intrinsic value, has a practical importance to which art cannot aspire.

You like it, that's all, whether it's a landscape or abstract. You like it. It hits you. You don't have to read it. The work of art-sculpture or painting-forces your eye.

Artists are meant to be madmen, to disturb and shock us.

The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. . . . They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; - cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame.