Archive

Quotes

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

—Charles Baudelaire, 1852

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

—Mencius, c. 330 BC

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

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

—G.C. Lichtenberg, c. 1780

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

—Aristotle, c. 350 BC

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

—W.H. Auden, c. 1940

Art lives from constraints and dies from freedom.

—Leonardo da Vinci, c. 1480

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

—G.K. Chesterton, 1928

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

—Thomas Jefferson, 1815

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

I never know quite when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, Dammit, Thurber, stop writing. She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, Is he sick? No, my wife says, he’s writing something.

—James Thurber, 1955

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

—Frank Zappa, c. 1975

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

—Lester Bangs, 1971