ARTISTS

Related Subjects: Architecture, Beauty, Criticism, Critics, Culture, Genius, Imitation, Literature, Music, Painting, Poets and Poetry, Sculpture, Singing, Skill, Temperament

1. I have an old theory that everyone makes a living on an artist except the artist himself and I begin to find both theory and practice tiresome.—F. P. A.,
   Diary of Our Own Samuel Pepys
   

2. A poet or a painter or a musician does not say to himself, "I will make a million first, and then I will write poetry or paint pictures or compose music." His art is life itself, the best of life, for the genuine artist.—JAMES TRUSLOW ADAMS, The Art of Living
   

3. In the still air the music lies unheard;
   In the rough marble beauty lies unseen;
   To wake the music and the beauty needs
   The master's touch, the sculptor's chisel keen.—HORATIUS BONAR, The Master's Touch
   

4. But the artist appeals to that part of our being which is not dependent on wisdom; to that in us which is a gift and not an acquisition—and, therefore, more permanently enduring. He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives: to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain.—JOSEPH CONRAD, Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus
   

5. He held his pen in trust
   To Art, not serving shame or lust.—AUSTIN DOBSON, In After Days
   

6. Art is a jealous mistress, and, if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture, or philosophy, he makes a bad husband, and an ill-provider.—EMERSON, Conduct of Life
   

7. You invest the heaven of art with we know not what deadly rays; you create a new shudder.—VICTOR HUGO, to Baudelaire

8. The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.—H. L. MENCKEN, Prejudices
   

9. The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature—particularly to edit it, and so make it coherent and lovely. The artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.—H. L. MENCKEN
   

10. If I was made for art, from childhood given
    A prey for burning beauty to devour,
    I blame the mistress I was born to serve.—MICHELANGELO
    

11. Alas! That I made art my idol, my monarch!—MICHELANGELO
    

12. He that lives with the muses shall die in the straw.—Proverb
    

13. An artist lives everywhere.—Proverb
    

14. It came to pass that after a time the artist was forgotten, but the work lived.—OLIVE SCHREINER, Dreams
    

15. If you are an artist, may no love of wealth or fame or admiration and no fear of blame or misunderstanding make you ever paint, with pen or brush, an ideal or a picture of external life otherwise than as you see it.—OLIVE SCHREINER, From Man to Man
    

16. Why, if I did not feel in my inmost soul the living light and love of that Christian faith, my works . . . would be the works of a liar and an ape. My art is my prayer.—RICHARD WAGNER
    

17. An artist's sphere of influence is the world.—CARL VON WEBER
    

18. An artist's career always begins tomorrow.—WHISTLER
    

19. The imitator is a poor kind of creature. If the man who paints only the tree, or flower, or other surface he sees before him were an artist, the king of artists would be the photographer. It is for the artist to do something beyond this: in portrait painting to put on canvas something more than the face the model wears for that one day; to paint the man, in short, as well as his features.—WHISTLER, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
    

20. Nature sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her master—her son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her.—WHISTLER, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies
    

21. It is only through the self-portraiture of great artists that the genius of mankind becomes comprehensible to earthbound mortals.—STEFAN ZWEIG, Adepts in
    Self-Portraiture