All humanity is passion without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution. Employ it, and thou art wise be wise and thou art happy.

Art has the power to transform, to illuminate, to educate, inspire and motivate.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!

The art of using deceit and cunning grow continually weaker and less effective to the user.

Parents are usually more careful to bestow knowledge on their children rather than virtue, the art of speaking well rather than doing well but their manners should be of the greatest concern.

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

Really I do not like human nature unless all candied over with art.

O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

What I have discovered is that in art, as in music, there is a lot of truth-and then there is a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It is the moment that the audience falls in love.

Where thou art, that is home.

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

I do not think about art when I am working. I try to think about life.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.