Art

“Art is not a thing — it is a way,” Elbert Hubbard

"All truly profound art requires its creator to abandon himself to certain powers which he invokes but cannot altogether control."  Andre Malraux

"Art is chaos shimmering behind a veil of order." Duvalis

"Art is fire plus algebra." - Jorge Luis Borges

"The allotted function of art is not, as if often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good." Tarkovsky

“No art is sunk in the self,” observed Flannery O’Connor, “but rather, in art the self becomes self-forgetful in order to meet the demands of the thing seen and the thing being made.”

"An artist has to learn to forgive. An artist has to learn to forgive. An artist has to learn to forgive." Marina Abramović

"The idea that we are most likely going to be forgotten should liberate the artist and not constrain him or her." John Ebersole

". . . Art remembers / a few things by forgetting many."  William Matthews, in “The Wolf of Gubbio,” in Time and Money

"Nature is a haunted house—but Art—is a house that tries to be haunted."  Emily Dickinson

"What we want from art is whatever is missing from the lives we are already living and making. Something is always missing, and so art-making is endless." Jane Hirshfield

"The worse your art is, the easier it is to talk about it."  John Ashbery

"Art should invite and repel interpretation."  Donald Barthelme

“Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.” ― Marcel Duchamp

"I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction. —Saul Bellow 

“Art undoes the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn't."  Theodore Roethke

“Art is meant to disturb. Science reassures.” Georges Braque

"Poetry isn’t writing, not really. It is the art of listening." Louis Simpson

"If an artist, scientist, or intellectual of whatever discipline is in the habit of comparing himself not to other members of his discipline but rather to the discipline itself, then the more intelligent he is the lower will be his opinion of himself. For his sense of his own inferiority grows in direct proportion to his deepening knowledge of his discipline. That is why all great men are modest."  Giacomo Leopardi

"True art can only spring from the intimate linking of the serious and the playful." J. W. Goethe

"A badly made thing falls apart. It takes only a few years for most of the energy to leak out of a defective work of art. To put it simply, conservation of energy is the function of form." Stanley Kunitz

"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers." James Baldwin

"Art is a lie which makes us realize the truth."  Picasso

"We have art so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth." Nietzsche