"Music is the vapor of art. It is to poetry what reverie is to thought, what fluid is to solid, what the ocean of clouds is to the ocean of waves."
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Art quotes
Art
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Art quotes (page 261 of 1107)
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"The earlier works of a man of genius are always preferred to the newer ones, in order to prove that he is going down instead of up."
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"Science is continually correcting what it has said. Fertile corrections... science is a ladder... poetry is a winged flight... An artistic masterpiece exists for all time... Dante does not efface Homer."
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"His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own."
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"People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments."
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"As for the author, he is profoundly unaware of what the classical or romantic genre might consist of.... In literature, as in allthings, there is only the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false."
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"I'm interested in Jackson Pollock's kind of art, where art is beautiful, but it's nothing, and yet it's incredible."
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"My "degree" has done nothing for me at all. But that I've learned - the critical thought processes I've tried to keep sharp - these things were furthered along by college. I hated so much of my life "at university," but I also loved so much of it, and the things that I loved about it have kept me in a sort of "scholarly pursuit" to this day. Maybe it messed me up because I believe that there are things like truth and beauty, and that art and discussion can help us find them and enhance our lives."
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"The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period."
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"I say me, knowing all the while it's not me."
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"My characters have nothing. I'm working with impotence, ignorance... that whole zone of being that has always been set aside by artists as something unusable - something by definition incompatible with art."
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"We should have thought of it when the world was young, in the nineties."
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"The situation is that of him who is helpless, cannot act, in the event cannot paint, since he is obliged to paint. The act is of him who, helpless, unable to act, acts, in the event paints, since he is obliged to paint."
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"Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry."
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"Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope."
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"Great is paint; nay, God is the painter; and we rightly accuse the critic who destroys too many illusions. Society does not love its unmaskers."
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"Whatever events in progress shall disgust men with cities, and infuse into them the passion for country life, and country pleasures, will render a service to the whole face of this continent, and will further the most poetic of all the occupations of real life, the bringing out by art the native but hidden graces of the landscape."
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"No man can quite emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, and arts, of his times shall have no share."
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"Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes: it is barbarous, it is civilized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this change is not amelioration. For every thing that is given, something else is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts."
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"We do not yet trust the unknown powers of thought. Whence came all these tools, inventions, book laws, parties, kingdoms? Out of the invisible world, through a few brains. The arts and institutions of men are created out of thought. The powers that make the capitalist are metaphysical, the force of method and force of will makes trade, and builds towns."
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