Archive

Quotes

Art imitates nature as well as it can, as a pupil follows his master; thus it is a sort of grandchild of God.

—Dante, c. 1315

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

—G.C. Lichtenberg, c. 1780

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1860

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

—Charles Baudelaire, 1852

I cannot live without books, but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1815

Everyone should know nowadays the unimportance of the photographic in art—that truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

—Tennessee Williams, 1944

If a king loves music, there is little wrong in the land.

—Mencius, c. 330 BC

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

—W.H. Auden, c. 1940

All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

—André Malraux, 1951

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1480

The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.

—Lester Bangs, 1971

If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come.

—Raymond Chandler, 1945

This is a fault common to all singers, that among their friends they will never sing when they are asked; unasked, they will never desist.

—Horace, c. 35 BC