Arts And Artists

(224 votes)   It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Henry James
1843-1916, American Author

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(223 votes)   What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Elizabeth Barrett Browning
1806-1861, British Poet

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(182 votes)   A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Edmond and Jules De Goncourt
1822-1896, French Writers

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(152 votes)   A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu
BC 600-?, Chinese Philosopher, Founder of Taoism, Author of the ''Tao Te Ching''

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(140 votes)   If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

John F. Kennedy
1917-1963, Thirty-fifth President of the USA

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(134 votes)   There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Adrienne Rich
1929-, American Poet

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(130 votes)   Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson
1803-1882, American Poet, Essayist

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(128 votes)   Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

William Wordsworth
1770-1850, British Poet

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(125 votes)   The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Andre Breton
1989-1966, French Surrealist

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(124 votes)   To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

George Jean Nathan
1882-1958, American Critic

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(121 votes)   Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Willem De Kooning
1904-, Dutch-born American Artist

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(118 votes)   The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Gilbert K. Chesterton
1874-1936, British Author

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(116 votes)   In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Sinclair Lewis
1885-1951, First American Novelist to win the Nobel Prize for literature

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(114 votes)   An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Willem De Kooning
1904-, Dutch-born American Artist

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(114 votes)   If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Leon Trotsky
1879-1940, Russian Revolutionary

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