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.
How empty learning, and how vain is art,
But as it mends the life, and guides the heart!
The air you breathe in a picture is not necessarily the same as the air out of doors.
I didn't become one.. .As long as I can remember I've always been one.
Degrade first the arts if you'd mankind degrade,
Hire idiots to paint with cold light and hot shade.
Piety in art—poetry in art—Puseyism in art—let us be careful how we confound them.
Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.