Quotes for the Aesthetes

Submitted by pianoshootis on Mon, 01/09/2006 - 03:20
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  • "ars gratia artis" -- Leo the Lion
  • "Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own." -- Benjamin Constant
  • "All art is quite useless." -- Oscar Wilde
  • "For thousands of years art was seen as a source of responsible moral and ethical leadership. Today, taking that stance is almost seen as comic." -- Jack Beal
  • "The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work." -- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  • "Art is not and never has been subordinate to moral values. Moral values are social values; aesthetic values are human values. Morality seeks to restrain the feelings; art seeks to define them by externalizing them, by giving them significant form. Morality has only one aim – the ideal good; art has quite another aim – the objective truth... art never changes." -- Herbert Read
  • "There can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art." -- Vladimir Nabokov
  • "The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial; his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does." -- Georg Baselitz
  • "There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall." -- Cyril Connolly
  • "The highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and let the chips fall where they may." -- JFK
  • "There is no must in art because art is free." -- Wassily Kandinsky
  • "Sooner barbarity than boredom." -- Theophile Gautier
  • "Moralists have no place in an art gallery." -- Han Suyin
  • "The beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself." -- Victor Cousin
  • "Art needs no spur beyond itself." -- Victor Hugo
  • "Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life." -- Henry Miller
  • "In old times men used their powers of painting to show the objects of faith; in later times. they used the objects of faith that they might show their powers of painting." -- John Ruskin
bertie02/02/2006

"Whenever I hear the world 'culture' I reach for my pistol." - Hermann Goering.