Art Quotes — page 9

It [angling] deserves commendations;… it is an art worthy the knowledge and practice of a wise man.

Music on the radio is very poor because it is badly distorted ... I quite approve of radios but they should not be used for musical purposes. They are good for news and for reports of ball games, boxing matches and speeches, where …

An artist must be man, woman and demi-god.

And evermore the Deep has worshipped God; And Bards and Prophets tune their mystic lyres While listening to the music of the floods.

Beauty like hers is genius.

The historian in the ideal history is as little seen as Shakespeare is seen in the tragedy of Hamlet....The camera is not seen in the sun picture; neither are the easel, the brush, the hand, and the eye of the artist seen on his canvas.

No tears, Celia, now shall win My resolved heart to return; I have search'd thy soul within, And find nought but pride and scorn; I have learned thy arts, and now Can disdain as much as thou.

Music is nothing else but wild sounds civilised into time and tune.

You may choose your word like a connoisseur, And polish it up with art, But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays, Is the word that comes from the heart.You may work on your word a thousand weeks, But it will not glow like one That all …

A fool and his words are soon parted; a man of genius and his money.

There are two things that kill a genius — a fatal disease and contentment. When a man is contented he goes to sleep. Voltaire had no chance to be contented, and so he wrote eternally and unceasingly, more than any other man in the history …

[T]he interests of science have suffered by the excessive admiration and wonder, with which several first rate philosophers are considered; and... an opinion of the greater equality of mankind, in point of genius, and powers of …

... art, like religion, appeals to the non-mechanical parts of our nature, to what in us is mystic and vital.

And then came a long interregnum devoted to the arts and mysteries of the toilet.

procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday

True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.

Custom, that is before all law; Nature, that is above all art.

Nature hav no music; nor would ther be for thee any better melody in the April woods at dawn than what an old stone-deaf labourer, lying awake o'night in his comfortless attic, might perchance be aware of, when the rats run amok in his …

There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.

Important truths still let your fable hold, And moral mysteries with art unfold.

Marriage is the clue to human life, but there is no marriage apart from the wheeling sun and the nodding earth, from the straying of the planets and the magnificance of the fixed stars. Is not a man different, utterly different, at dawn …

[T]he course of ages has fulfilled the prophecy and promise, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build My Church; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be …

No prime-minister in the parliament of letters has, at any time, ventured to introduce a bill for the apprehension of all vagrant inverted commas that may be found trespassing in the sunny places of argument; and to restrain the poaching …

Genius does what it must, and Talent does what it can.