Quotes to inspire and reflect

No one has mastery/Before he is at the end/Of his art and his life.

1 feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that’s wn-American somehow.

The grandeur of man lies in song, not in thought.

I already have a wife, who is too much for me; one who keeps me unceasingly struggling on. It is my art, and my works are my children.

An art is only great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything.

Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, deprecating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.

There is a way of being an artist that goes so deep and is so much a matter of origins and destinies that no longing seems to it sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace.

Thought that can merge wholly into feeling, feeling that can merge wholly into thought—these are the artist’s highest joy.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

The only domain where the divine is visible is that of art, whatever name we choose to call it.

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.

If you would have me weep, you must first of all feel grief yourself.

Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.

Nobody, I think, ought to read poetry, or look at pictures or statues, who cannot find a great deal more in them than the poet or artist has actually expressed.

There is no better deliverance from the world

Nature scarcely ever gives us the very best; for that we must have recourse to art.

The work of art is the exaggeration of an idea.

The work of art is a part of nature seen through a temperament.

The artist cannot get along without a public; and when the public is absent, what does he do? He invents it, and turning his back on his age, he looks toward the future for what the present denies.

Art helps nature, and experience art.

In art, as in love, instinct is enough.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer- ciable ones of the human spirit.

Picture and sculpture are the celebrations and festivities of form.

It depends little on the object, much on the mood, in art.

Life is as the sea, art a ship in which man conquers life’s crushing formlessness, reducing it to a course, a series of swells, tides and wind currents inscribed on a chart.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.

No generation is interested in art in quite the same way as any other; each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art.

There is no progress in art.

Every master knows that the material teaches the artist.

Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work.

The artist’s work constitutes the only satisfactory relationship he can have with his fellow men since he seeks his real friends among the dead and the unborn.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life.

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself, and the more he tries to conceal himself the more clearly will his character appear in spite of him.

The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period.

One may do whate’er one likes / In Art: the only thing is, to make sure / That one does like it.

What critics often ask for is the impossible, though this may be a salutary means of extending the borders of art.

Perhaps art is simply an organism’s reaction against its retentive limitations.

All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up.

Where position is felt to be a birthright, generosity is possible (though not guaranteed); flexibility is not inhibited by a commitment to perpetual success.

The business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself.

True disputants are like true sportsmen; their whole delight is in the pursuit.

High people, Sir, are the best; take a hundred ladies of quality, you’ll find them better wives, better mothers, more willing to sacrifice their own pleasures to their children, than a hundred other women.

A disputant no more cares for the truth than the sportsman for the hare.

When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true.