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I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten....
-John Berger
Miners, exhibition catalogue, 1989; in Keeping a Rendezvous, 1992.
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What is art but a way of seeing?
-Thomas Berger
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The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.
-Adolf Berle
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The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.
-John Berryman
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The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
-Professor Blackie
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The great artist is a slave to his ideals.
-Christian Nevell Bovee
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Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.
-Elizabeth Bowen
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By art he gladly found what he did seek,
A full requital of his striving pain.
Art can do much, but this maxim's most sure:
A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.
-Anne Dudley Bradstreet
The Prologue
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The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.
-Constantin Brancusi
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The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
-Andre Breton
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Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence. Art is the perfection of nature. Were the world now as it was the sixth day, there were yet a chaos. Nature hath made one world, and art another. In brief, all things are artificial; for nature is the art of God.
-Sir Thomas Browne
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What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?
-Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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No sketches first, no studies, that
-Robert Browning
The Faultless Painter (Andrea del Sarto, l. 78, Men and Women, vol. 2), 1855
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Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.
-Duke of Buckingham
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In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.
-Luis Bunuel
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Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.
-Anthony Burgess
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Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.
-William S. Burroughs
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To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.
-Albert Camus
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It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
-Albert Camus
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Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
-Albert Camus
Resistance, Rebellion, and Death
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The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.
-Albert Camus
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Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.
-Al Capp
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Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.
-Angela Carter
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Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.
-Neal Cassady
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Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.
-Willa Cather
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Books about Art
