Quotes about Art

A life well lived is the most exquisite work of art.

Words are in a way our godly sharing in the work of creation, and the speaking and writing of words is at once the most human and the most holy business we engage in.

Art is not tame, and Nature is not wild, in the ordinary sense. A perfect work of man's art would also be wild or natural in a good sense.

I always liked the idea that you can put something in you onto a canvas or a piece of paper and have it exist there and not inside you. It's a way to control things.

In my opinion, an album has a story from start to finish and has a concrete concept.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.

As for being poisoned by a book, there is no such thing as that. Art has no influence upon action. It annihilates the desire to act. It is superbly sterile. The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame.

The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself. The reason I will not exhibit this picture is that I am afraid that I have shown in it the secret of my own soul.

Before Turner there was no fog in London.

Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.