“In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.”
“Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.”
“Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.”
“To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.”
“The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.”
“The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.”
“What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.”
“[A]rt is limitation. [...] The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”
“He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]”
“Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?”
“Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.”
“Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.”
“Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.”
“The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.”
“Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.”
“What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?”
“In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.”
“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”
“The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.”
“Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.”
“The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.”
“Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.”
“The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.”
“A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.”
“A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.”
“Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.”
“The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.”
“Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”
“No great artist ever sees things as they really are, if he did he would cease to be an artist.”
“Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.”