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One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.
-Johann von Goethe
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Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient.
-Johann von Goethe
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A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.
-Edmond de Goncourt
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Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?
-Nadine Gordimer
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Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.
-Gunther Grass
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Painting does not come from intelligence so much, as from sight and feeling and invention.
-Hamerton
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There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.
-Vaclav Havel
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Sunlight is painting.
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
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Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.
-Benjamin Haydon
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-Martin Heidegger
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So wie die Verruecktheit in einem hoeheren Sinn, der Anfang aller Weisheit ist, so ist die Schizophrenie der Anfang aller Kunst, aller Phantasie. (As insanity in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art, all fantasy.)
-Hermann Hesse
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If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.
-David Hockney
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A picture is a poem without words.
-Horace
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While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual and the sublime are suspect today, I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art.
-Ian Hornak, "Cover Magazine", 1994
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If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay -- in solid cash -- the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
-Aldous Huxley
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The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
-Aldous Huxley
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A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.
-Eugene Ionesco
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The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.
-Max Jacob
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It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.
-Henry James
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-Henry James
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Art has an enemy called ignorance.
-Ben Johnson
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Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.
-Samuel Johnson
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Patron: One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.
-Samuel Johnson
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No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.
-Samuel Johnson
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Books about Art
