Art Quotes — page 39

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

On this hapless earth There ’s small sincerity of mirth, And laughter oft is but an art To drown the outcry of the heart.

If Commerce is necessary to wealth, no Commerce means no wealth, and our statesman soon finds himself out of employment. Where wealth again is greatest, everything else being fairly equal, arts thrive the most.

Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm; it is the real allegory of the tale of Orpheus—it moves stones, it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.

She poured out the liquid music of her voice to quench the thirst of his spirit.

smother the investigating spirit under the featherbed of respected and respectable tradition. But, in every age, one or two restless spirits, blessed with that constructive genius

This truth — to prove, and make thine own: ‘Thou hast been, shalt be, art, alone.’

they must cease to exaggerate the exaggerations of our enemies; and represent the colored man rather as he is

The genius is childlike. Like children he looks into the world as into a new creation and finds there a perennial source of wonder and delight.

Compulsion in religion is distinguished peculiarly from compulsion in every other thing. I may grow rich by art I am compelled to follow, I may recover health by medicines I am compelled to take against my own judgment, but I cannot be …

1978. If thou art wise, thou knowest thy own Ignorance; and thou art ignorant if thou knowest not thy self.

..art lies in the fine choice. The artist does not teach us to see facts: he teaches us to feel harmonies.

In Art we know nothing for certain.

To seek in nature the fairest forms and to find the movement which expresses the soul of these forms — this is the art of the dancer.

From the earliest days of my pupilage to art I had been instinctively drawn towards the paintings of Turner, Corot, Constable, Bonington, and Watts, with an intense admiration for their manner in viewing, and methods of re-creating, nature …

Turner was a very different man to Constable, yet quite like him in one respect, namely, his entire reliance on a guide within himself, always a characteristic of genius.

An artistic impression is substantially the resultant of two components. One what the work of art gives the onlooker — the other, what he is capable of giving to the work of art.

Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe.

Definition and division are the watchwords of science, where art is all for composition and creation.

Honest investigation is but the application of common sense to the solution of the unknown. Science does not wait on Genius, but is the companion of Industry.

I care not for these ladies, That must be wooed and prayed; Give me kind Amaryllis, The wanton country maid. Nature art disdaineth; Her beauty is her own.

Genius is but the free and harmonious play of all the faculties of a human being.

It is for the philosophic student to trace the train of thought which underlies the magicians practice; to draw out the few simple threads of which the tangled skein is composed; to disengage the abstract principles from their concrete …

Gloomy grammarians in golden gowns, Meekly you keep the mortal rendezvous, Eliciting the still sustaining pomps Of speech which are like music so profound They seem an exaltation without sound.