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Quotes about art

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I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.
William Morris1834–1896The Decorative Arts (1877)
- Education
- Freedom
Even the best critical writing on Emily Dickinson underestimates her. She is frightening.
Camille Pagliaborn 1947Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 624
- Poetry
What is an artist? A provincial who finds himself somewhere between a physical reality and a metaphysical one…
Federico Fellini1920–1993“Every Time We Say Goodbye” in Sight and Sound [London] ( June 1991)
Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
Charles Mingus1922–1979Statement in Mainliner (July 1977), as quoted in Creativity and the writing process (1982) by Olivia Bertagnolli, p. 182
All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.
Upton Sinclair1878–1968Mammonart—an Essay in Economic Interpretation Ch. 2 Who Owns the Artists? (1925)
Thou that singest wheat and woodland, tilth and vineyard, hive and horse and herd;
All the charm of all the Muses often flowering in a lonely word.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson1809–1892“To Virgil”, st. 3 (1882)
- Poetry
I think of few heroic actions, which cannot be traced to the artistical impulse. He who does great deeds, does them from his innate sensitiveness to moral beauty.
Walt Whitman1819–1892“Talk to an Art-Union (A Brooklyn fragment)”, in Complete Prose Works (1892)
- Beauty
When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do.
Hermann Hesse1877–1962Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)
- Life & Death
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Willa Cather1873–1947The Song of the Lark (1915), Part VI, Ch. 11
- Truth & Lies
It is a beautiful truth that all men contain something of the artist in them. And perhaps it is the case that the greatest artists live and die, the world and themselves alike ignorant what they possess.
Walt Whitman1819–1892“Talk to an Art-Union (A Brooklyn fragment)”, in Complete Prose Works (1892)
The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.
Paul Klee1879–1940Diary entry (December 1905), # 733, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918; University of California Press, 1968
- Beauty
People go to the movies instead of moving!
Tennessee Williams1911–1983The Glass Menagerie (1944), Tom, Scene Six
- Movies
Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated? Good night!
John Lydonborn 1956At the end of the last Sex Pistols concert, Winterland Theater, San Francisco, California (14 January 1978)
- Music
Every artist’s strictly illimitable country is himself.
E. E. Cummings1894–1962i: six nonlectures (1953), “Re Ezra Pound”
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
Jean-Luc Godard1930–2022Source: “What Is Cinema?” Les Amis du Cinéma (Paris, 1 October 1952)