Inspirational Quotes on Art

“Imagination is the faculty of the mind that God has given us to make the communication of his beauty beautiful.”

“Vronsky’s interest in art and the Middle Ages did not last long. He had sufficient taste for art to be unable to finish his picture. He ceased painting it because he was dimly conscious that its defects, little noticeable at first, would become striking if he went on.”

“The need for beauty and the [artistic] creation which embodies it is inseparable from man, and without it man would possibly not want to live in the world.”

“A sick man's dreams are often extraordinarily distinct and vivid and extremely life-like. A scene may be composed of the most unnatural and incongruous elements, but the setting and presentation are so plausible, the details so subtle, so unexpected, so artistically in harmony with the whole picture, that the dreamer could not invent them for himself in his waking state, even if he were an artist like Pushkin or Turgenev. Such morbid dreams always make a strong impression on the dreamer's already disturbed and excited nerves, and are remembered for a long time.”

“Whatever in a work of art is not used, is doing harm.”

“Art is the effort to appreciate and express the God who is its Beauty.”

“When a man devotes himself body and spirit to a single object, if he has training and aptitude, no matter how mediocre he may be in ordinary affairs, he will produce something so nearly akin to a work of genius as to deceive half the judges who think themselves competent to decide between genius and talent. ("The Phantom Model")”

“They were both young men under thirty. Art is not so precocious as literature, and does not send quite so many early potatoes into the market, so that the age of thirty is considered young enough for a painter to have learnt his business sufficiently to be marketable from the picture-dealing point of view. ("The Phantom Model")”

“I would like my pictures to look as if a human being had passed between them, like a snail, leaving a trail of the human presence and memory of the past events as the snail leaves its slime. Francis Bacon in conversation in Daniel Farson”

“The last thing we discover in composing a work is what to put down first.”

“He has heard, and causes those with ears to hear, even today, what we shall not see until the end of time - the whole context of Providence. As though in the light of this end, he heard the harmony of creation to which the shadow belongs but in which the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway...Mozart causes us to hear that even on the latter side, and therefore in its totality creation praises its master and is therefore perfect.”

“...those works that don't touch the heart, it seems to me, miss the true aim of Art.”

“Existence is in a way so banal, you may as well try and make a kind of grandeur of it. Francis Bacon in conversation in Daniel Farson”

“Skal man hjelpe en annen, må man først finne ut hvor han er, og møte ham der. Dette er det første bud i all sann hjelpekunst.”

“A crucifix exists in order to direct the worshipper’s thought and affections to the Passion. It had better not have any excellencies, subtleties, or originalities which will fix attention upon itself.”

“In the entr’acte Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the merits and defects of music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying to take music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes wrong when it tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to do, and as an instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who carved in marble certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of the poet on the pedestal. "These phantoms were so far from being phantoms that they were positively clinging on the ladder," said Levin. [...] Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its highest manifestations only by conjunction with all kinds of art.”

“[T]he many use art and the few receive it. The many behave in this like a man who talks who should listen or gives when he should take. I do not mean by this that the right spectator is passive. His is also an imaginative activity; but an obedient one.”

“His vision was religious and clean, and therefore his paintings were without decoration or superfluous comment, since a religious man respects the power of God's creation to bear witness for itself.”

“It becomes one who is called to be a soldier, and to go a warfare, to endeavor to excel in the art of war. It becomes one who is called to be a mariner, and to spend his life in sailing the ocean, to endeavor to excel in the art of navigation. It becomes one who professes to be a physician, and devotes himself to that work, to endeavor to excel in the knowledge of those things which pertain to the art of physic. So it becomes all such as profess to be Christians, and to devote themselves to the practice of Christianity, to endeavor to excel in the knowledge of divinity.”

“The greatest challenge in art is in dealing with disappointment.”