Quotes about art

"No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly," His Highness replied, "...and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it."

Architects and painters know precisely what they are about as long as they deal with material phenomena. … But when they come to the aesthetics of their work, when they aim at a particular effect on the mind or on the senses, the rules dissolve into nothing but vague ideas.

One of the pleasant things those of us who write or paint do is to have the daily miracle. It does come.

There is no pulse so sure of the state of a nation as its characteristic art product which has nothing to do with its material life.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting — the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Art is anything you can get away with.

It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV. (p. 53)

A work is perfectly finished only when nothing can be added to it and nothing taken away.

All reflection is art.

To judge things of taste, we must give ourselves time to taste them.

An artist should be open on all sides to every kind of light and darkness.

Contrast is everything, Ned said. Incongruity is essential. The secret of art lies in attaining a sense of proper juxtapositions, and what is religion if not a category of art?