Famously Said Random quote

Quotes about art

621 quotes from 285 people

Most readBy personPage 11 of 42

Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), Part II
- Poetry
Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965
Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965“Dante” (1929), in Selected Essays (1932), p. 238
- Poetry
Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965
- Poetry
As things are, and as fundamentally they must always be, poetry is not a career, but a mug’s game. No honest poet can ever feel quite sure of the permanent value of what he has written: He may have wasted his time and messed up his life for nothing.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965
- Poetry
When I see a play and understand it the first time, then I know it can’t be much good.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965
- Movies
Playwriting gets into your blood and you can’t stop it. At least, not until the producers or the public tell you to.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965
- Movies
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915), Line 1In context
- Poetry
The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
T. S. Eliot1888–1965Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), Part II
- Poetry
Music takes us out of the actual and whispers to us dim secrets that startle our wonder as to who we are, and for what, whence, and whereto.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882
- Music
Creative force, like a musical composer, goes on unweariedly repeating a simple air or theme, now high, now low, in solo, in chorus, ten thousand times reverberated, till it fills earth and heaven with the chant.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882
Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Poems (1847), The Problem, st. 3
A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Society and Solitude (1870), Art
There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts, that is, the poet.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Nature (1836), Nature
- Nature
- Poetry
I wish to write such rhymes as shall not suggest a restraint, but contrariwise the wildest freedom.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Journal (27 June 1839)
- Freedom
- Poetry