Quotes About Great Works Of Art

#1. Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight.

John Cusack

#2. Many great works of art, poetry, and music are inspired by astral memories. The desire to do noble, beautiful things here on Earth is also often a carryover of astral experiences between a person's earth lives.

Paramahansa Yogananda

#3. Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility.

Robert Nozick

#4. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

Marcel Proust

#5. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#6. I feel genius in great works of art. I have seen medical cures that science can't explain, some seemingly triggered by faith. The same is true of millions of other people.

Deepak Chopra

#7. I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)

Auguste Rodin

#8. All great works of art are trophies of victorious struggle.

Julius Meier-Graefe

#9. Words are like shards of glass. By themselves they're worthless; however, when placed together in just the right way, they can become great works of art.

Leigh M. Lane

#10. The reality is that art has often risen to greater heights than the people who created it. Many flawed artists have created great works of art. You have to decide if you are going to listen to Richard Wagner's music or not because he was very anti-Semitic.

Gavin Hood

#11. I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation.

George Bernard Shaw

#12. I think it's always hard for people to get their head around the fact that populist, commercial films can also actually be great works of art.

Helen Mirren

#13. Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.

Alex Grey

#14. All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.

Marcel Proust

#15. Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.

Leo Tolstoy

#16. An acquaintance with the great works of art and thought is the only real insurance against the barbarism of the time.

Edmund Wilson

#17. Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.

Marcel Proust

#18. I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.

Gerhard Richter

#19. When you examine the genesis of great works of art, successful start-ups, and revolutionary shifts in politics, you can always trace back a history of monetary and nonmonetary exchange, the hidden patrons and underlying favors.

Amanda Palmer

#20. When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.

Billy Joel

#21. Think about how many great works of art or game-changing ideas were ahead of their time - their creator's talent underappreciated until many years later. That's how we need to treat our young people - because who knows where the next great idea will come from?

Ashley Bryan

#22. There are people who buy pictures because they were difficult to do, and are done. Such pictures are often only a record of pain and dull perseverance. Great works of art should look as though they were made in joy. Real joy is a tremendous activity, dull drudgery is nothing to it.

Robert Henri

#23. I've been collecting art for much of my adult life. I started around 1960. And my wife and I really enjoy art a great deal. We don't have a lot of money, so we have works on paper, but we enjoy them a great deal.

Eric Kandel

#24. Genius is that in which the soul of a race bums at its brightest, revealing and preserving its vision; works of art are great and significant in proportion to the clarity and fulness with which they incarnate this vision.

George Edward Woodberry

#25. Art was always my main focus; I fell into writing by accident in the 1980s, writing magazine articles to pay for my studio. I have to put myself into the position of writing; sometimes it doesn't work, and sometimes it works great.

Douglas Coupland

#26. There is sometimes a greater judgement shewn in deviating from the rules of art, than in adhering to them; and?there ismore beauty inthe works of a great genius who is ignorant of all the rules of art, than in the works of a little genius, who not only knows but scrupulously observes them.

Joseph Addison

#27. Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its maker's attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

Guy Davenport

#28. If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.

Katherine Paterson

#29. My books and other works are my legacy, and it's a great comfort to know that mine is a legacy of pleasure for other people.

Colleen McCullough

#30. Art begins where technique ends. There can be no real art development before one's technique is firmly established. And a great deal of technical work has to be done before the great works of violin literature, the sonatas and concertos, may be approached.

Leopold Auer

#31. Everything that now exists, no matter how great and good it is, lasts for a time, fulfills a purpose, and then passes on. And so it will be with all the works of art that now exist; an eternal veil of forgetfulness will lie over them, just as there is now over those things that came before.

Adalbert Stifter

#32. Of course, it is well to go abroad and see the works of the old masters, but Americans ... must strike out for themselves, and only by doing this will we create a great and distinctly American art.

Thomas Eakins

#33. I was poorer than anyone I'd ever met. But it was a great time to be a young artist - I remember it as a period of exceptional creative freedom and adventure, when one was regularly presented with works of art unlike anything one had ever seen before.

Michael Craig-Martin

#34. Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.

Eugenio Montale

#35. The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.

Stefan Zweig

#36. How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.

Elizabeth Hardwick

#37. I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great.

Carl Sagan

#38. The reader's feedback is the muse for great written works of art.

Sarah Scott

#39. Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish.

Arne Glimcher

#40. If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.

Jasper Fforde

#41. Recently, the Germans have developed a tendency to prefer the so-called first (youthful) style of great artists to their mature works. Could it be that they do not realize that their aesthetic criteria, generally speaking, are juvenile?

Franz Grillparzer

#42. It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.

Michel De Montaigne

#43. My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her.

Jacob Rothschild