Art Quotes — page 40

Art indeed is long, but life is short.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize.

The air of the New World seems favorable to the art of declamation.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul and paints his own nature into his picture.

In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, — even though it be …

To wake the soul by tender strokes of art, To raise the genius, and to mend the heart; To make mankind, in conscious virtue bold, Live o'er each scene, and be what they behold: For this the Tragic Muse first trod the stage.

I am certainly of opinion that genius can be acquired, or, in the alternative, that it is an almost universal possession.

The harp that once through Tara's halls The soul of music shed, Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls As if that soul were fled. So sleeps the pride of former days, So glory's thrill is o'er;

The love of praise, howe'er concealed by art, Reigns more or less, and glows in ev'ry heart.

"The water in music the oar forsakes." The air in music the wing forsakes. All things move in music and write it. The mouse, lizard, and grasshopper sing together on the Turlock sands, sing with the morning stars.

What an incalculable debt do we owe to that little speck of land, Greece.—The principles of taste, the finest models of composition, the doctrines and the glorious examples to which we owe political freedom, the arts, the sciences, …

Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without the music is prose from its very definitiveness.

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure much.

Various Arts by study might be wrought Up to their height.

With head upraised, and look intent, And eye and ear attentive bent, And locks flung back, and lips apart, Like monument of Grecian art, In listening mood, she seemed to stand, The guardian Naiad of the strand.

Now Art, used collectively for painting, sculpture, architecture and music, is the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into …

The real doth not clip the poet's wings,— To win the secret of a weed’s plain heart Reveals some clue to spiritual things, And stumbling guess becomes firm-footed art.

By nature a philosopher is not in genius and disposition half so different from a street porter, as a mastiff is from a greyhound,

Diplomacy, n. The patriotic art of lying for one's country.

What is art but the denial of life?

There can be no real and effective “freedom” in a society based on the power of money, in a society in which the masses of working people live in poverty and the handful of rich live like parasites

Much converse do I find in thee, Historian of my infancy! Float near me; do not yet depart! Dead times revive in thee: Thou bring'st, gay creature as thou art! A solemn image to my heart.

It is a great art to saunter.

Imagination... implies originality. It results in a reflection... of the working mind of the designer. ...Imagination may be called the dynamic force in art. ...It is the quality which distinguishes the artistic from the photographic …