Art Quotes

“I love a ballad but even too well if it be doleful matter merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed and sung lamentably.”

“If it be true that good wine needs no bush, 'tis true that a good play needs no epilogue.”

“The object of Art is to give life a shape.”

“In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.”

“I have heard it saidThere is an art which in their piedness sharesWith great creating nature.”

“I heard a bird so sing, Whose music, to my thinking, pleased the king.”

“To hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature.”

“The sky is the ultimate art gallery just above us.”

“We are made aware that magnitude of material things is relative, and all objects shrink and expand to serve the passion of the poet. Thus, in his sonnets, the lays of birds, the scents and dyes of flowers, he finds to be the shadow of his beloved; time, which keeps her from him, is his chest; the suspicion she has awakened, is her ornament”

“If we tire of the saints, Shakspeare is our city of refuge.”

“I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind; a Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise, or a history of beasts; or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Everything is significant.”

“The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.”

“The truth, the hope, of any time must be sought in the minorities. Michael Angelo was the conscience of Italy. We grow free with his name, and find it ornamental now, but in his own day his friends were few.”

“Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for the wrongs of his condition.”

“Accuracy is essential to beauty.”

“I had rather be a Kitten, and cry mew, Than one of these same Meeter Ballad-mongers: I had rather heare a Brazen Candlestick turn'd, Or a dry Wheele grate on the Axle-tree, And that would set my teeth nothing an edge, Nothing so much, as mincing Poetrie.”

“Good writing is a kind of skating which carries off the performer where he would not go.”

“In the Greek cities, it was reckoned profane, that any person should pretend a property in a work of art, which belonged to all who could behold it.”

“In good writing, words become one with things.”

“Life too near paralyses art.”

“In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.”

“There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art.”

“Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book; a personality which, by birth and quality, is pledged to the doctrines there set forth, and which exists to see and state things so, and not otherwise.”

“People do not deserve to have good writing, they are so pleased with bad.”

“There comes a period of the imagination to each--a later youth--the power of beauty, the power of looks, of poetry.”