Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Kind hearts are the garden, kind thoughts are the roots, kind words are the blossoms, kind deeds are the fruit.
Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer.
He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.
The artist's business is to feel, although he may think a little sometimes... when he has nothing better to do.
Painters love paint itself: so much that they spend years trying to get paint to behave the way they want it to.
We live in a dominant culture of ceaseless Departure and Progress that has so far lasted two or three centuries.
Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.
The common practice of keeping up appearances with society is a mere selfish struggle of the vain with the vain.
Architecture concerns itself only with those characters of an edifice which are above and beyond its common use.
If the design of the building be originally bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be signs of antiquity.
Like many natural beauties, New York is effortlessly photogenic. It has fabulous bones and hardly any bad angles.
The publicity image steals her love of herself as she is, and offers it back to her for the price of the product.
It is a matter of the simplest demonstration, that no man can be really appreciated but by his equal or superior.
So far as I have myself observed, the distinctive character of a child is to live always in the tangible present.
The proof of a thing's being right is that it has power over the heart; that it excites us, wins us, or helps us.
I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.
It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing.
A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the oneself that there is no self left to die.
Anything which elevates the mind is sublime. Greatness of matter, space, power, virtue or beauty, are all sublime.
A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.
It is in this power of saying everything, and yet saying nothing too plainly, that the perfection of art consists.
If a work of art or a new style disturbs you, then it is probably good work. If you hate it, it is probably great.
Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast.
When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job.
The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States; it is arguably the finest anywhere.
Every great man is always being helped by everybody, for his gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.
The beauty of the animal form is in exact proportion to the amount of moral and intellectual virtue expressed by it.
You might sooner get lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your modern English religion.
There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it.
Work first and then rest. Work first, and then gaze, but do not use golden ploughshares, nor bind ledgers in enamel.
Whatever art is, it is no longer something primarily to be looked at. Stared at, perhaps, but not primarily looked at
The autobiographical doesn't interest me. I could think of few things less interesting than rooting about in my life.
All really great pictures exhibit the general habits of nature, manifested in some peculiar, rare, and beautiful way.
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
Labour without joy is base. Labour without sorrow is base. Sorrow without labour is base. Joy without labour is base.
Here is a paradox. It would seem that there cannot be surrealism and photography, but only photography or surrealism.
No artifact is a work of art if it does not help to humanize us. Without art...our world would have remained a jungle.
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world... to see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion all in one.
Nature is always mysterious and secret in her use of means; and art is always likest her when it is most inexplicable.
There is no process of amalgamation by which opinions, wrong individually, can become right merely by their multitude.
Surely our clergy need not be surprised at the daily increasing distrust in the public mind of the efficacy of prayer.
We've got a recipe for disaster. It's huge -- this combination of body image issues and the drug's weight loss appeal.
There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man's reason has never learnt to separate them.
Government is the art of the momentary feasible, of the least bad attainable, and not of the rationally most desirable.
Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.
Shadows are in reality, when the sun is shining, the most conspicuous thing in a landscape, next to the highest lights.
Black and white can show how something is. Color adds how it is, imbued with temperatures and humidities of experience.
Fishing largely consists of not catching fish; failure is as much a part of the sport as knee injuries are of football.
Most artists probably feel lonely or set apart in childhood. But they grow up and find people who share their interests.
Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.