Quotes about Art

We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography.

The more abstract, the more ideal an art is, the more it reveals to us the temper of its age. If we wish to understand a nation by means of its art, let us look at its architecture or its music.

What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.  Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out.

No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid.

The only beautiful things, as somebody once said, are the things that do not concern us. As long as a thing is useful or necessary to us...it is outside the proper sphere of art.

When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

The truth is rarely pure and never simple.  Modern life would be very tedious if it were either, and modern literature a complete impossibility! Jack.  That wouldn't be at all a bad thing. Algernon.  Literary criticism is not your forte, my dear fellow.  Don't try it.  You should leave that to people who haven't been at a University.  They do it so well in the daily papers. 

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

I had been foolish in imagining that I had seen anything in it, more than that you were extremely good looking, and that I could paint.

Like the painting of a sorrow, A face without a heart.

Conversation is one of the loveliest of the arts.

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.