Art Quotes — page 37

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

Simplicity and Dignity are so nearly related that they may be considered together. ...A quiet air of reserved power is characteristic of dignity, and that is best obtained by simple means and the absence of apparent effort. Simplicity is …

Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.

They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.

Had my eye never on the beauty dwelt Of human face, and my ear never drank The music of a human voice; I feel My spirit would have pour'd itself in song, Have learn'd a language from the rustling leaves, The singing of the birds, and of …

Painting is a science and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may not a landscape be considered as a branch of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but experiments?

Genius is rarely able to give any account of its own processes.

Dullness is so much stronger than genius because there is so much more of it, and it is better organised and more naturally cohesive.

Economy is the art of making the most of life. The love of economy is the root of all virtue.

[T]he Method which ought to be follow'd in instructing a Scholar in the Executive Part of Painting; ...first have him learn the most common Effections of Practical Geometry, and the first Elements of Plain Geometry, and common Arithmetic.

..the art of becoming 'rich', in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbour shall have less. In accurate terms, it is 'the art of establishing …

Mercury has cast aside The signs of intellectual pride, Freely offers thee the soul: Art thou noble to receive? Canst thou give or take the whole, Nobly promise and believe?

There is, I think, no more nutritive or suggestive truth... than that of the perfect dependence of the "moral" sense of a work of art on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it. The question comes back thus, obviously, to the …

"Wilt thou not save me? once in every year This rightful form of mine that thou dost see By favour of the Goddess have I here From sunrise unto sunset given me, That some brave man may end my misery. And thou — art thou not brave? can thy …

Little Fly, Thy summer's play My thoughtless hand Has brushed away. Am not I A fly like thee?

Where dost thou careless lie, Buried in ease and sloth? Knowledge that sleeps, doth die; And this security, It is the common moth, That eats on wits and arts, and oft destroys them both.

How can this cosmic religious experience be communicated from man to man, if it cannot lead to a definite conception of God or to a theology? It seems to me that the most important function of art and of science is to arouse and keep alive …

Art is long, and Time is fleeting, And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave.

A man that has a taste of music, painting, or architecture, is like one that has another sense, when compared with such as have no relish of those arts.

This is life to come, — Which martyred men have made more glorious For us who strive to follow.

Kurt Schwitters is the inventor of Merz and I, and aside of himself, he recognizes no one as a Merz artist or an I artist with highest regards.

Slowly, under our feet, beneath our consciousness, is forming that new philosophy, and it is in times of new philosophies that Art, itself in essence always a discovery, must flourish.

Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had.

The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons.