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It cannot be emphasized too strongly that art, as such, does not "pay," to use an American expression – at least, not in the beginning – and that the art that has to pay its own way is apt to become vitiated and cheap.

— Antonín Dvořák

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Art

More quotes by Antonín Dvořák

In the negro melodies of America I discover all that is needed for a great and noble school of music.

"The Americans expect great things of me... If the small Czech nation can have such musicians, they say, why could not they, too, when their country and people is so immense."

The music of the people is like a rare and lovely flower growing amidst encroaching weeds. Thousands pass it, while others trample it under foot, and thus the chances are that it will perish before it is seen by the one discriminating spirit who will prize it above all else. The fact that no one has as yet arisen to make the most of it does not prove that nothing is there.

I am now satisfied that the future music of this country must be founded upon what are called negro melodies. This must be the real foundation of any serious and original school of composition to be developed in the United States.

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The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

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A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

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Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Antonín Dvořák (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.