Art Quotes
Artists themselves fill the top places, which is unusual. Monet leads, then Erich Fromm, Renoir, John Galsworthy and Berthe Morisot, so the page has a lot of painters talking about painting. For the theory side, Tolstoy’s What Is Art? (1897) calls art a human activity whose purpose is to transmit the highest and best feelings to others, and Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), says that if the world were clear, art would not exist.
“I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream” is credited to Vincent van Gogh and flagged misattributed. The notes list early versions: a French form, “Je rêve mon tableau, et plus tard je peindrai mon rêve,” cited in a 1918 book, and English translations in the Musical Courier of 1908.
A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.
Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.
Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.
Life without industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality.
One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.
There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.
Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.