Quotes & Sayings About Painting And Poetry

Mathematics is an activity governed by the same rules imposed upon the symphonies of Beethoven, the paintings of DaVinci, and the poetry of Homer. — Edward Kasner

The dance is the mother of the arts. Music and poetry exist in time; painting and architecture in space. But the dance lives at once in time and space. — Curt Sachs

Why do we smile? Why do we laugh? Why do we feel alone? Why are we sad and confused? Why do we read poetry? Why do we cry when we see a painting? Why is there a riot in the heart when we love? Why do we feel shame? What is that thing in the pit of your stomach called desire? — Benjamin Alire Saenz

The growth of art seems to be in cycles, and often its vigorous lifetime is restricted to a century or two. The periods of distinctive drama, Greek, English, Spanish, fall within such a limit; the schools of painting and sculpture likewise; and, in poetry, the Victorian age or the school of Pope will serve as examples. — George Edward Woodberry

Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry, and music have had charms unknown to me before. I have received what I suppose is a taste for them, or religion has refined my mind and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful. O, how religion secures the heightened enjoyment of those pleasures which keep so many from God, by their becoming a source of pride! — Henry Martyn

The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture--whereof the principle branch is Confectionery. — Marie-Antoine Careme

Cinema is a kind of pan-art. It can use, incorporate, engulf virtually any other art: the novel, poetry, theater, painting, sculpture, dance, music, architecture. Unlike opera, which is a (virtually) frozen art form, the cinema is and has been a fruitfully conservative medium of ideas and styles of emotions. — Susan Sontag

The wall between writing and painting is just good grammar.

Moderation in moderation.

Fun is scary with a happy ending.

Just love. If love doesn't transform that which annoys you, it will be easier to tolerate. — Emily Thornton Calvo

Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn't realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy. — Marcel Duchamp

I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life. — Rafael Moneo

Dancing is surely the most basic and relevant of all forms of expression. Nothing else can so effectively give outward form to an inner experience. Poetry and music exist in time. Painting and architecture are a part of space. But only the dance lives at once in both space and time. In it the creator and the thing created, the artist and the expression, are one. Each participates completely in the other. There could be no better metaphor for an understanding of the mechanics of the cosmos. — Lyall Watson

He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life. This is the century that has shaped all the conquering arms against this elusive adversary called boredom. Love, Poetry, Music, Theatre, Painting, Architecture, Court, Salons, Parks and Gardens, Gastronomy, Letters, Arts, Science, all contributed to the satisfaction of physical appetites, intellectual and even moral refinement of all pleasures, all the elegance and all the pleasures. The existence was so well filled that if the seventeenth century was the Great Age of glories, the eighteenth was that of indigestion. — Charles Maurice De Talleyrand-Perigord

Without painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and the emotions produced by natural beauty of every kind, life would lose half its charm. — Herbert Spencer

While Elstir, at my request, went on painting, I wandered about in the half-light, stopping to examine first one picture, then another.
Most of those that covered the walls were not what I should chiefly have liked to see of his work, paintings in what an English art journal which lay about on the reading-room table in the Grand Hotel called his first and second manners, the mythological manner and the manner in which he shewed signs of Japanese influence, both admirably exemplified, the article said, in the collection of Mme. de Guermantes. Naturally enough, what he had in his studio were almost all seascapes done here, at Balbec. But I was able to discern from these that the charm of each of them lay in a sort of metamorphosis of the things represented in it, analogous to what in poetry we call metaphor, and that, if God the Father had created things by naming them, it was by taking away their names or giving them other names that Elstir created them anew. — Marcel Proust

For the last fifty years or so, The Novel's demise has been broadcast on an almost weekly basis. Yet it strikes me that whatever happens, however else the geography of the imagination might modify in the future in, say, the digital ether, The Novel will continue to survive for some long time to come because it is able to investigate and cherish two things that film, music, painting, dance, architecture, drama, podcasts, cellphone exchanges, and even poetry can't in a lush, protracted mode. The first is the intricacy and beauty of language - especially the polyphonic qualities of it to which Bakhtin first drew our attention. And the second is human consciousness. What other art form allows one to feel we are entering and inhabiting another mind for hundreds of pages and several weeks on end? — Lance Olsen

The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world ofits own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited. — Walter Pater

Abstract reason, formerly the servant of practical human reasons, has everywhere become its master, and denies poetry any excuse for existence.
Though philosophers like to define poetry as irrational fancy, for us it is practical, humorous, reasonable way of being ourselves. Of never acquiescing in a fraud; of never accepting the secondary-rate in poetry, painting, music, love, friends. Of safeguarding our poetic institutions against the encroachments of mechanized, insensate, inhumane, abstract rationality. — Robert Graves

I love painting and music, of course. I don't know nearly as much about them as I know about poetry. I've certainly been influenced by fiction. I was overwhelmed by War and Peace when I read it, and I didn't read it until I was in my late 20s. — Kenneth Koch

Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish. — William Blake

Poetry and painting are rooted in the same law,
The work of heaven and of the first cause. — Su Shi

Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace - without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself. — Joan Miro

What is the world? What is it for?
It is an art. It is the best of all possible art, a finite picture of the infinite. Assess it like prose, like poetry, like architecture, sculpture, painting, dance, delta blues, opera, tragedy, comedy, romance, epic. Assess it like you would a Faberge egg, like a gunfight, like a musical, like a snowflake, like a death, a birth, a triumph, a love story, a tornado, a smile, a heartbreak, a sweater, a hunger pain, a desire, a fufillment, a desert, a waterfall, a song, a race, a frog, a play, a song, a marriage, a consummation, a thirst quenched.
Assess it like that. And when you're done, find an ant and have him assess the cathedrals of Europe. — N.D. Wilson

If Painting be Poetry's sister, she can only be a sister Anne, who will see nothing but a flock of sheep, while the other bodies forth a troop of dragoons with drawn sabres and white-plumed helmets. — Augustus William Hare

The only way to get change is not through the courts or - heaven forbid - the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts - music, poetry, dance, painting, writing - can we really reach each other, — Leslie Marmon Silko

Many women are singing together of this:
one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,
one is at the aquarium tending a seal,
one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,
one is at the toll gate collecting,
one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,
one is straddling a cello in Russia,
one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,
one is painting her bedroom walls moon color,
one is dying but remembering a breakfast,
one is stretching on her mat in Thailand,
one is wiping the ass of her child,
one is staring out the window of a train
in the middle of Wyoming and one is
anywhere and some are everywhere and all
seem to be singing, although some can not
sing a note. — Anne Sexton

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment. — P.J. Harvey

In the entr'acte Levin and Pestsov fell into an argument upon the merits and defects of music of the Wagner school. Levin maintained that the mistake of Wagner and all his followers lay in their trying to take music into the sphere of another art, just as poetry goes wrong when it tries to paint a face as the art of painting ought to do, and as an instance of this mistake he cited the sculptor who carved in marble certain poetic phantasms flitting round the figure of the poet on the pedestal. "These phantoms were so far from being phantoms that they were positively clinging on the ladder," said Levin. [ ... ] Pestsov maintained that art is one, and that it can attain its highest manifestations only by conjunction with all kinds of art. — Leo Tolstoy

Architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry, may truly be called the efflorescence of civilised life. — Herbert Spencer

Especially in the world today, where science rightfully is so important in terms of technology, innovation, telecom, Internet, fighting diseases, I think it's equally important that poetry and painting have their share of support. — Leon Black

You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them
well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies. — Joseph Campbell

Painting is silent poetry,
and poetry is painting that speaks. — Plutarch

[M]editation is not just being silent - that is only one part of it ... [I]t has to be creative. And when a poetry comes out of your inner silences, or a painting, it has a flavor which is not of this world. — Rajneesh

The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery.
Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream. — Anais Nin

Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature. — James Freeman Clarke

Art is a distinct form of human communication. Art interprets experience, sensation, and feelings. An artistic work translates our mental images and allows other people to understand what we feel; art conveys our happiness, sadness, hopes, doubts, anxieties, fears, desires, and ineffable longings. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Usually, I am a compulsive person, and I need - sometimes urgently - to paint ... Painting is close to poetry, is a kind of poetry expressed visually. It has to be spontaneous, rapid - at least in my case. — Etel Adnan

I have to study politics and war so that my sons can study mathematics, commerce and agriculture, so their sons can study poetry, painting and music. — John Quincy Adams

And the dark night of flow is an issue that society has not made particularly easy to handle. How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors - activities packed with flow triggers - because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like "career" or "children"? How many, now grown up and done with childish things, have put away the surfboard, the skateboard, the whatever? How many have made the mistake of conflating the value of the vehicle that leads us to an experience (the surfboard, etc.) with the value of the experience itself (the flow state)? — Steven Kotler

The explanation of this perennial quality of Arabic is to be found simply in the conserving role of nomadism. It is in towns that languages decay, by becoming worn out, the things and institutions they designate. Nomads, who live to some extent outside time, conserve their language better; it is, moreover, the only treasure they can carry around with them in their pastoral existence; the nomad is a jealous guardian of his linguistic heritage, his poetry and his rhetorical art. On the other hand, his inheritance in the way of visual art cannot be rich; architecture presupposes stability, and the same is broadly true of sculpture and painting. — Titus Burckhardt

Poetry and painting have arrived to their perfection in our own country; music is yet but in its nonage [immaturity], a forward Child, which gives hope of what it may be hereafter in England, when the masters of it shall find more Encouragement. — Henry Purcell

Poetry operates by raising our curiosity, engaging the mind by degrees to take an interest in the event, keeping that event suspended, and surprising at last with an unexpected catastrophe. The painter's art is more confined, and has nothing that corresponds with, or perhaps is equivalent to, this power and advantage of leading the mind on, till attention is totally engaged. What is done by Painting, must be done at one blow; curiosity has received at once all the satisfaction it can ever have. — Joshua Reynolds

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. — Leonardo Da Vinci

I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. (12 May 1780) — John Adams

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. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

I make no distinction between poetry and painting. — Joan Miro

Therapy is to make one happy. What is the point of that? Happy people are not interesting. Better to accept the burden of unhappiness and try to turn it into something worthwhile, poetry or music or painting: that is what he been believes. — J.M. Coetzee

[...] Thus the sedentary peoples create the plastic arts (architecture, sculpture, painting), the arts consisting of forms developed in space; the nomads create the phonetic arts (music, poetry), the arts consisting of forms unfolded in time; for, let us say it again, all art is in its origin essentially symbolical and ritual, and only through a late degeneration, indeed a very recent degeneration, has it lost its sacred character so as to become at last the purely profane 'recreation' to which it has been reduced among our contemporaries. — Rene Guenon

I am nothing but a dilettante,
a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and several other of the
so-called unprofitable arts.
Above all else I am a dilettante in life
Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry.
I never
got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the first stanza.
There are people like that who begin everything, and never finish anything.
I am
such a one. — Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch

Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind. — Jane Hirshfield

Rivers are inherently interesting. They mold landscapes, create fertile deltas, provide trade routes, a source for food and water; a place to wash and play; civilizations emerged next to rivers in China, India, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. They sustain life and bring death and destruction. They are ferocious at times; gentle at times. They are placid and mean. They trigger conflict and delineate boundaries. Rivers are the stuff of metaphor and fable, painting and poetry. Rivers unite and divide - a thread that runs from source to exhausted release. — Edward Gargan

Genius is its own reward; for the best that one is, one must necessarily be for oneself ... Further, genius consists in the working of the free intellect., and as a consequence the productions of genius serve no useful purpose. The work of genius may be music, philosophy, painting, or poetry; it is nothing for use or profit. To be useless and unprofitable is one of the characteristics of genius; it is their patent of nobility. — Arthur Schopenhauer

If the imagination is shackled, and nothing is described but what we see, seldom will anything truly great be produced either in Painting or Poetry — Thomas Cole

The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it's the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it's a failure in communication. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti

It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about ... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field. — Werner Herzog

When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music. — Denis Diderot

Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting — Leonardo Da Vinci

Pound thought better than he practiced in this particular instance, for his Metro poem was supposedly a pure example of what he meant by Vorticism: "The image is not an idea. It is a radiant node or cluster; it is what I can, and must perforce call a vortex; from which and through which and into which ideas are constantly rushing. It is as true for the painting and the sculpture as it is for poetry. — Kenneth Yasuda

Daemonic compulsiveness can kill as easily as it can save.
The true novelist must be at once driven and indifferent. Van
Gogh never sold a painting in his life. Poe came close with
poetry and fiction, selling very little. Drivenness only helps if
it forces the writer not to suicide but to the making of splendid
works of art, allowing him indifference to whether or not the
novel sells, whether or not it's appreciated. Drivenness is trouble
for both the novelist and his friends; but no novelist, I
think, can succeed without it. Along with the peasant in the
novelist, there must be a man with a whip. — John Gardner

In the sphere of natural investigation, as in poetry and painting, the delineation of that which appeals most strongly to the imagination, derives its collective interest from the vivid truthfulness with which the individual features are portrayed. — David Hume

Herein is the explanation of the analogies, which exist in all the arts. They are the re-appearance of one mind, working in many materials to many temporary ends. Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakspeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it. Painting was called "silent poetry," and poetry "speaking painting." The laws of each art are convertible into the laws of every other. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poetry is superior to painting in the presentation of words, and painting is superior to poetry in the presentation of facts. For this reason I judge painting to be superior to poetry. — Leonardo Da Vinci

We maintain, therefore, that the first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot; and that the Characters come second - compare the parallel in painting, where the most beautiful colours laid on without order will not give one the same pleasure as a simple black-and-white sketch of a portrait. — Aristotle.

What can I do with these people? They come to the risk so dutifully. Are delighted by anecdotes that give them Poetry. Are grateful to be told of diagonals that give them Painting. Good people. But stubborn when warned the beast is not domestic. How can I persuade them that the dark, soulful Keats was five feet one? Liked fighting and bear-baiting? I can't explain the red hair. Nor say how you died so full of lust for Fanny Brawne. I will tell them of Semele. — Jack Gilbert

Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction. — John Dryden

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut

Poetry and painting continue to be companions: they cast their shadow and light, their silences and tones, at the edges of each other. — Pierre Coupey

The arts which need interpretation are the arts of time
music and poetry
and not the arts of space
sculpture and painting. — Salvador De Madariaga

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons. — Francisco Goya

Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language. — Steven Pinker

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society.[ ... ]what the poet is saying- that is, what his poem "means" if translated into prose- is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether. — George Orwell

Chemistry has the same quickening and suggestive influence upon the algebraist as a visit to the Royal Academy, or the old masters may be supposed to have on a Browning or a Tennyson. Indeed it seems to me that an exact homology exists between painting and poetry on the one hand and modem chemistry and modem algebra on the other. In poetry and algebra we have the pure idea elaborated and expressed through the vehicle of language, in painting and chemistry the idea enveloped in matter, depending in part on manual processes and the resources of art for its due manifestation. — James Joseph Sylvester

Photography is painting with light! The blurs, the spots, those are errors! But the errors are part of it, they give it poetry and turn it into painting. And for that you need as bad a camera as possible! If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you're doing worse than anyone else in the whole world. — Miroslav Tichy

What I have lately said of painting is equally true with respect to poetry. It is only necessary for us to know what is really excellent, and venture to give it expression; and that is saying much in few words. To-day I have had a scene, which, if literally related, would, make the most beautiful idyl in the world. But why should I talk of poetry and scenes and idyls? Can we never take pleasure in nature without having recourse to art? — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

All great questions must be raised by great voices, and the greatest voice is the voice of the people - speaking out - in prose, or painting or poetry or music; speaking out - in homes and halls, streets and farms, courts and cafes - let that voice speak and the stillness you hear will be the gratitude of mankind. — Robert Kennedy

I think I love and reverence all arts equally, only putting my own just above the others; because in it I recognize the union and culmination of my own. To me it seems as if when God conceived the world, that was Poetry; He formed it, and that was Sculpture; He colored it, and that was Painting; He peopled it with living beings, and that was the grand, divine, eternal Drama. — Charlotte Saunders Cushman

My father's death when I was eighteen and his struggles as a Jewish immigrant provided me with the raw material, but for a long time I went from painting to fiction and then finally to poetry before I could find the right way of telling this story. — Philip Schultz

The real you is still a little child who never grew up. Sometimes that little child comes out when you are having fun or playing, when you feel happy, when you are painting, or writing poetry, or playing the piano, or expressing yourself in some way. These are the happiest moments of your life - when the real you comes out, when you don't care about the past and you don't worry about the future. You are childlike. — Miguel Ruiz

I've always been a fan of poetry. I grew up with Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Beat poets. I really followed that stuff for a while. I just love the way people threw words around like they were painting. — Ric Ocasek

By denying people's sense of visual beauty in painting and sculpture , melody in music , meter and rhyme in poetry , plot and narrative and character in fiction , the elite arts wrote off the vast majority of their audience . They purposely excluded people who approach art in part for pleasure and edification in favour of social one-upmanship and an ever-narrowing, in-crowd elite. — Steven Pinker

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul. — Thomas More

You have made me ashamed of the wasted years. You have made me acknowledge that no darkness has ever been deep enough to extinguish my personal knowledge of love. And all around me in this world I see evidence of love. I see love. I see it in the human struggle. I see its undeniable penetration in all that humans have accomplished in their poetry, their painting, their music, their love of one another and refusal to accept suffering as their lot. — Anne Rice

Again, we can see the importance of imaginal practices such as journals, dream work, poetry, painting, and therapy aimed at exploring images in dream and life. These methods keep us actively engaged in the mythologies that are the stuff of our own lives. The — Thomas Moore

Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Unlike music or poetry or painting, food rouses no response in passionate and emotional youth. Only when the surge of the blood is quieted does gastronomy come into its own with philosophy and theology and the sterner delights of the mind. — Dorothy L. Sayers

Prague is far more than the sum of its physical parts or its history. It is a city of the mind and the imagination, a city that exists as vividly in poetry and painting and music and legend as it does in brick and stone... Just as the physical city of Prague would be unimaginable without its unique topography, without its palaces, its churches, its parks, its streets, and its hostelries, so the Prague of the mind would be unimaginable without its storytellers and the tales they weave. — Paul Wilson

Everybody is born with the capacity to enjoy, but not with the art. People think just because they are alive and they breathe and they exist, they know how to enjoy. That is sheer stupidity. Enjoyment is a great art, it is a great discipline. It is as subtle a discipline as music or poetry or painting. It is the greatest creativity. — Rajneesh

The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one. — Colm Toibin

I must study war and politics so that my children shall be free to study commerce, agriculture and other practicalities, so that their children can study painting, poetry and other fine things. — John Adams

Many Hollywoodians may have good taste and an interest in culture but they certainly hide it. They're afraid they'll be branded as sissies if someone finds out they write poetry or own a painting. They're so timid about culture. — Vincent Price

Dancing and building are the two primary and essential arts. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that expressthemselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite. Music, acting, poetry proceed in the one mighty stream; sculpture, painting, all the arts of design, in the other. There is no primary art outside these two arts, for their origin is far earlier than man himself; and dancing came first. — Havelock Ellis

I sincerely believe that the best criticism is the criticism that is entertaining and poetic; not a cold analytical type of criticism, which, claiming to explain everything, is devoid of hatred and love, and deliberately rids itself of any trace of feeling, but, since a fine painting is nature reflected by an artist, the best critical study, I repeat, will be the one that is that painting reflected by an intelligent and sensitive mind. Thus the best accounts of a picture may well be a sonnet or an elegy ... But that type of criticism is destined for books of poetry and for readers of poetry. As to criticism proper, I hope philosophers will understand what I am about to say: to be in focus, in other words to justify itself, criticism must be partial, passionate, political, that is to say it must adopt an exclusive point of view, provided always the one adopted opens up the widest horizons. — Charles Baudelaire

The legend of our times, it has been suggested, might be "The Revenge of Failure". This is what Envy has done for us. If we cannot paint well, we will destroy the canons of painting and pass ourselves off as painters. If we will not take the trouble to write poetry, we will destroy the rules of prosody and pass ourselves off as poets. If we are not inclined to the rigors of an academic discipline, we will destroy the standards of that discipline and pass ourselves off as graduates. If we cannot or will not read, we will say that "linear thought" is now irrelevant and so dispense with reading. If we cannot make music, we will simply make a noise and persuade others that it is music. If we can do nothing at all, why! we will strum a guitar all day, and call it self-expression. As long as no talent is required, no apprenticeship to a skill, everyone can do it, and we are all magically made equal. Envy has at least momentarily been appeased,and failure has had its revenge. — Henry Fairlie

And on the days I couldn't breathe, I learned to paint air. — Jenim Dibie

Painting, like poetry, selects in the universe whatever she deems most appropriate to her ends. She assembles in a single fantastic personage, circumstances and features which nature distributes among many individuals. From this combination, ingeniously composed, results that happy imitation by virtue of which the artist earns the title of inventor and not of servile copyist. — Francisco Goya

Friends are discovered rather than made; there are people who are in their own nature friends, only they don't know each other; but certain things, like poetry, music, and paintings are like the Freemason's sign, they reveal the initiated to each other. — Harriet Beecher Stowe

The five excellences include: calligraphy, painting, poetry, medicine, and t'ai chi chuan. — Cheng Man-ch'ing

Little deer, I've stuffed all the world's diseases inside you. / Your veins are thorns // and the good cells are lost in the deep dark woods / of your organs. — Pascale Petit

Poetry' is what distinguishes the cubist paintings Picasso and I arrived at intuitively from the lifeless sort of painting those who followed us tried, with such unfortunate results, to arrive at theoretically. — Georges Braque

And here in my isolation I can grow stronger. Poetry seems to come of itself, without effort, and I need only let myself dream a little while painting to suggest it. — Paul Gauguin

What I had to say to you, moreover, would not take long, to wit: Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.
Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives ... .
You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what's inside you, and you have made your soul grow. — Kurt Vonnegut