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Quotes

Modesty is a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

—Miguel de Cervantes, 1615

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

—W.H. Auden, c. 1940

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

—Charles Baudelaire, 1852

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

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

—G.C. Lichtenberg, c. 1780

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

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

—G.K. Chesterton, 1928

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.

—George Eliot, c. 1872

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

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1887

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

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