Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We usually meet all of our relatives only at funerals where somebody always observes: "Too bad we can't get together more often".
It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.
I know it's dangerous to take on bloggers. They can go after you every day, all day long, and anonymous people can chime in, too.
Drawing is a way of coming upon the connection between things, just like metaphor in poetry reconnects what has become separated.
Every authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry... to bring together what life has separated or violence has torn apart.
What we think or what we know or what we believe is in the end of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do
No one can become rich by the efforts of only their toil, but only by the discovery of some method of taxing the labor of others.
A word is a thought, of course. But any image, including a photograph, may become an instrument of sufficiently lucid cogitation.
The pleasure that attaches to the artistic life comes in imagining what we might do as opposed to acknowledging what we have done.
To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of 'disinterest' strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting.
Contrast increases the splendor of beauty, but it disturbs its influence; it adds to its attractiveness, but diminishes its power.
Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement.
I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.
The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.
No person who is not a great sculptor or painter can be an architect. If he is not a sculptor or painter, he can only be a builder.
If you want knowledge, you must toil for it; if food, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it: toil is the law.
I would rather teach drawing that my pupils may learn to love nature, than teach the looking at nature that they may learn to draw.
Death is not a journey into an unknown land; it is a voyage home. We are going, not to a strange country, but to our fathers house.
That man is always happy who is in the presence of something which he cannot know to the full, which he is always going on to know.
The beginning and almost the end of all good law is that everyone shall work for their bread and receive good bread for their work.
The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.
Emigration, forced or chosen, across national frontiers or from village to metropolis, is the quintessential experience of our time.
Ever since the Greek tragedies, artists have, from time to time, asked themselves how they might influence ongoing political events.
The only absolutely and unapproachably heroic element in the soldier's work seems to be-that he is paid little for it-and regularly.
The step between practical and theoretic science, is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apocathecary and the chemist.
There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera.
Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.
Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique - without which however it cannot exist at all.
At every moment of our lives we should be trying to find out, not in what we differ with other people, but in what we agree with them.
Which of us?is to do the hard and dirty work for the restand for what pay? Who is to do the pleasant and clean work, and for what pay?
There's art that I would readily buy if I could afford it, and enjoy, but would never write about because it doesn't seem significant.
Christmas began in the heart of God. It is complete only when it reaches the heart of man.Why wait for a call when you have a command?
Modern thought has transferred the spectral character of Death to the notion of time itself. Time has become Death triumphant over all.
The envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and for others) of their power.
It is not the church we want, but the sacrifice; not the emotion of admiration, but the act of adoration; not the gift, but the giving.
Everything that you can see in the world around you presents itself to your eyes only as an arrangement of patches of different colors.
Not only is there but one way of doing things rightly, but there is only one way of seeing them, and that is, seeing the whole of them.
All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.
I have not written in vain if I have heretofore done anything towards diminishing the reputation of the Renaissance landscape painting.
Almost all institutions own a lot more art than they can ever show, much of it revealing for its timeliness, genius, or sheer weirdness.
In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.
The virtue of the imagination is its reaching, by intuition and intensity, a more essential truth than is seen at the surface of things.
That admiration of the 'neat but not gaudy,' which is commonly reported to have influenced the devil when he painted his tail pea green.
The greatest efforts of the race have always been traceable to the love of praise, as the greatest catastrophes to the love of pleasure.
When the whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own hearts blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic.
I've seen the Rhine with younger wave, O'er every obstacle to rave. I see the Rhine in his native wild Is still a mighty mountain child.
What I want to know from students, and I ask them right away, is, 'What do you want? I don't care what it is. I want to help you get it.
The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter's muddy humors, and its brilliant transformations are the painter's unexpected discoveries.
The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.
What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware. And that would be our loss.