"Reading is a majority skill but a minority art."
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Art quotes
Art
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Art quotes (page 218 of 1107)
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"Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader."
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"Everything in art depends on execution: the story of a louse can be as beautiful as the story of Alexander. You must write according to your feelings, be sure those feelings are true, and let everything else go hang. When a line is good it ceases to belong to any school. A line of prose must be as immutable as a line of poetry."
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"There are thus two tasks for the Mass Media division of Unesco, the one general, the other special. The special one is to enlist the press and the radio and the cinema to the fullest extent in the service of formal and adult education, of science and learning, of art and culture. The general one is to see that these agencies are used both to contribute to mutual comprehension between different nations and cultures, and also to promote the growth of a common outlook shared by all nations and cultures."
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"Because every book of art, be it a poem or a cupola, is understandably a self-portrait of its author, we won't strain ourselves too hard trying to distinguish between the author's persona and the poem's lyrical hero. As a rule, such distinctions are quite meaningless, if only because a lyrical hero is invariably an author's self-projection."
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"Nature is always mysterious and secret in her use of means; and art is always likest her when it is most inexplicable."
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"It is excellent discipline for an author to feel that he must say all that he has to say in the fewest possible words, or his readers is sure to skip them."
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"There's a lot of different kinds of success. I'm so dedicated to the making of the art that the rest of my life atrophies, unfortunately."
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"There's so much art and it's gotten so flashy. In the global marketplace, having art that's shiny and has neon lights is almost what you need for anyone to notice it in an art fair situation - and art fairs seem to be more and more the only thing there is."
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"No one's conception of art is going to be acceptable to everybody."
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"For where there is love of man, there is also love of the art."
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"Life is short and the art long."
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"The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank."
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"It is certainly true that reason is the most important and the highest rank among all things and, in comparison with other things of this life, the best and something divine. It is the inventor and mentor of all the arts, medicines, laws, and of whatever wisdom, power, virtue, and glory men possess in this life."
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"I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character."
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"Mathematics is the summit of human thinking. It has all the creativity and imagination that you can find in all kinds of art, but unlike art-charlatans and all kinds of quacks will not succeed there."
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"I'm going to teach you the art of swordsmanship-or in other words, how to totally kill someone with a sharp, pointy thing."
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"We have more poets than judges and interpreters of poetry. It is easier to write an indifferent poem than to understand a good one. There is, indeed, a certain low and moderate sort of poetry, that a man may well enough judge by certain rules of art; but the true, supreme, and divine poesy is equally above all rules and reason. And whoever discerns the beauty of it with the most assured and most steady sight sees no more than the quick reflection of a flash of lightning."
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"Literature is a form of language that breaks with the whole definition of genres as forms adapted to an order of representations, and becomes merely a manifestation of a language which has no other law than that of affirming in opposition to all other forms of discourse its own precipitous existence."
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"The public buys "art" - but the word is drained of its meaning."
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