Quotes about art
621 quotes from 285 people
Poetry must have something in it that is barbaric, vast and wild.
Denis Diderot1713–1784On Dramatic Poetry (1758)Earth proudly wears the Parthenon
As the best gem upon her zone.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Poems (1847), The Problem, st. 3Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral.
Robert Louis Stevenson1850–1894An Inland Voyage (1878).A poet without love were a physical and metaphysical impossibility.
Thomas Carlyle1795–1881Burns (1828).God is the perfect poet,
Who in his person acts his own creations.
Robert Browning1812–1889Paracelsus (1835), Part 2.To a poet, silence is an acceptable response, even a flattering one.
Colette1873–1954Paris From My Window (1944)There is only one thing that can kill the Movies, and that is education.
Will Rogers1879–1935The Autobiography of Will Rogers (1949)You know who critics are?— the men who have failed in literature and art.
Benjamin Disraeli1804–1881Lothair (1870), Ch. 35Accordion, n. An instrument in harmony with the sentiments of an assassin.
Ambrose Bierce1842–1914The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)For his heart was in his work, and the heart
Giveth grace unto every Art.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow1807–1882The Building of the Ship, Line 7.A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.
Robert Graves1895–1985The Paris Review, “Writers at Work: 4th series,” interview with Peter Buckman and William Fifield (1969)One must not always think that feeling is everything. Art is nothing without form.
Gustave Flaubert1821–1880Letters to Madame Louise Colet, 12 August 1846My life has been the poem I would have writ,
But I could not both live and utter it.
Henry David Thoreau1817–1862A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), FridayPhotographs deceive time, freezing it on a piece of cardboard where the soul is silent.
Isabel Allendeborn 1942Of Love and Shadows (1984)A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Cocteau1889–1963A Call to Order (1926)