“The job of the artist is to deepen the mystery.”
~Francis Bacon
“’Art isn’t meaningless.’
‘It is in itself. It isn’t in that it tries to make life less so.’”
~F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dick Caramel and Maury Noble in The Beautiful and the Damned
“True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.”
~Albert Einstein
“We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.”
~Pablo Picasso
“My feeling about technique in art is that it has the same value as technique in lovemaking. That is to say, heartfelt ineptitude has its charm and so has heartless skill, but what you really want is passionate virtuosity.”
~John Barth
“You should keep on painting no matter how difficult it is, because this is all part of experience, and the more experience you can have, the better it is--unless it kills you, and then you know you have gone too far.”
~Alice Neels
“What is beauty if it is not the refusal of the habitual? What is art if it is not the invitation to shed new light on the world and on oneself?”
~Helmut Lachenmann
“Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought - these are the artist's highest joy.”
~Thomas Mann
“The key to the mystery of a great artist is that for reasons unknown, he will give away his energies and his life just to make sure that one note follows another inevitably . . . and leaves us with the feeling that something is right in the world.”
~Leonard Bernstein (re: Beethoven)
“Art is a jealous mistress.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wealth
“An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.”
~Charles Horton Cooley
“The
mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.”
~Goethe
“The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.”
~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist”
~Oscar Wilde
“Art is the essence of awareness."
~Louise Nevelson
“Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.”
~Ralph Waldo Emerson, Art
“Art
at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can
always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to
happen to it.”
~Marshall McLuhan
“Any form of art is a form of power, it has an impact, it can effect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.”
~Ossie Davis
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
~Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island
“[The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear…which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”
~Joseph Conrad
“Art teaches nothing except the signifigance of life.”
~Henry Miller