Children, like animals, use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way all over again.
When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his experience. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgement. The artist. . . faithful to his personal vision of reality, becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an offensive state.
Art is the expression of an enormous preference.
Conception, my boy, fundamental brainwork, is what makes the difference in all art.
An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.
Pioneers did not produce original works of art, because they were creating original human environments; they did not imagine Utopias because they were shaping them.
Art is a human activity, consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of external signs, hands on to others feelings he has worked through, and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.
A picture lives by companionship. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling.
Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.
Culture is something you cannot buy, something you cannot import, something you cannot learn or produce at will. A writer, an artist or musician cannot sit down and say 'Now I will produce culture.' Culture is something that evolves out of the simple, enduring elements of everyday life; elements most truthfully expressed in the folk arts and crafts of a nation.
Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.
Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity.
All art is a revolt against man's fate.
Art is a delayed echo.
Art is a kind of illness.
One must work, nothing but work, and one must have patience.
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather it makes it visible.
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
One of the recognizable features of the authentic masterpiece is its capacity to renew itself, to endure the loss of some kinds of immediate relevance while still answering the most important questions men can ask, including new ones they are just learning how to frame.
