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.
The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest.
Art is recuperation
from time. I lie back
convalescing upon the prospect
of a harvest already at hand.
Many secrets of art and nature are thought by the unlearned to be magical.
Art is the closest we can come to understanding how a stranger really feels.
Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.
Art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe.
It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.
Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.
The whole art of politics consists in directing rationally the irrationalities of men.
Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Art enlarges experience by admitting us to the inner life of others.
True art is to create a magnificent city and fill the hearts of its people with happiness.
“Art,” Frankly goes on, “has always been a polite form of terrorism.”