Quotes about Art

I had learned from my own father that it was almost blasphemy to regard the function of art as merely to reproduce some kind of a sensible pleasure or, at best, to stir up the emotions to a transitory thrill. I had always understood that art was contemplation, and that it involved the action of the highest faculties of man.

That is precisely why you will miss all the deepest meaning of Shakespeare, Dante, and the rest if you reduce their vital and creative statements about life and men to the dry, matter-of-fact terms of history, or ethics, or some other science. They belong to a different order.

I, who had always been anti-naturalistic in art, had been a pure naturalist in the moral order. No wonder my soul was sick and torn apart: but now the bleeding wound was drawn together by the notion of Christian virtue, ordered to the union of the soul with God.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.

Faith... is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... it has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival.

Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.

Women's creativity is called craft and is sold cheap; when men create, the result is called art and is costly, like Maurizio Cattelan's banana taped to a Miami art gallery wall with a price tag of US$120,000.

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.