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Quotes

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1480

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

—G.C. Lichtenberg, c. 1780

If we pretend to respect the artist at all, we must allow him his freedom of choice, in the face, in particular cases, of innumerable presumptions that the choice will not fructify. Art derives a considerable part of its beneficial exercise from flying in the face of presumptions.

—Henry James, 1884

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

—G.K. Chesterton, 1928

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

—André Breton, 1937

I hate the whole race. There is no believing a word they say—your professional poets, I mean—there never existed a more worthless set than Byron and his friends for example.

—Duke of Wellington, c. 1810

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

—Mencius, c. 330 BC

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay in solid cash—the tribute which philistinism owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

—Aldous Huxley, 1926

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

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

—Charles Baudelaire, 1852

When we see a natural style we are quite amazed and delighted, because we expected to see an author and find a man.

—Blaise Pascal, c. 1657

It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mold, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen till I had given the last polish to my work.

—Edward Gibbon, c. 1790

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