Quotes by American Authors - Page 206

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.
John Kenneth Galbraith
Beauty as we feel it is something indescribable what it is or what it means can never be said.
George Santayana
I'm tired of all the nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want - an adorable pancreas?
Jean Kerr
Some thoughts always find us young and keep us so. Such a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Nature of This Flower is to bloom.
Alice Walker
We ascribe beauty to that which is simple which has no superfluous parts which exactly answers its ends.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty more than bitterness Makes the heart break.
Sara Teasdale
Beauty is everlasting And dust is for a time.
Marianne Moore
Do you love me because I'm beautiful or am I beautiful because you love me?
Oscar Hammerstein
As a beauty I am not a star There are others more handsome by far But my face - I don't mind it For I am behind it. It's the people in front get the jar.
Anthony Euwer
Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful we must carry it with us or we find it not.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Beauty without expression tires.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
And all the loveliest things there be Come simply so it seems to me.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies.
Thomas Jefferson
A single man has not nearly the value he would have in a state of union. He is an incomplete animal. He resembles the odd half of a pair of scissors.
Benjamin Franklin
Sweetest li'l feller everybody knows Dunno what to call him but he's mighty lak' a rose Lookin' at his mammy wid eyes so shiny blue Mek' you think that Heav'n is comin' clost ter you.
Frank L. Stanton
Here we have baby. It is composed of a bald head and a pair of lungs.
Eugene Field
The birds can fly An' why can't I?
John Trowbridge
O it sets my heart a clickin' like the tickin' of a clock When the frost is on the punkin and the fodder's in the shock.
James Whitcomb Riley
The melancholy days have come the saddest of the year Of wailing winds and naked woods and meadows brown and sear.
William Cullen Bryant
All authority belongs to the people.
Thomas Jefferson
I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.
Clarence Darrow
Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
George Jean Nathan
The terror of art lies in the representation of the hidden reality with its shattering effect.
Martin Greenburg
An artist has been defined as a neurotic who continually cures himself with his art.
Lee Simonson
Art is based on order. The world is full of 'sloppy Bohemians' and their work betrays them.
Eduard Weston
Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.
H.L. Mencken
Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In any evolutionary process even in the arts the search for novelty becomes corrupting.
Kenneth Boulding
Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story.
Maurice Sendak
All art is a kind of confession more or less oblique. All artists if they are to survive are forced at last to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.
James Baldwin
With the pride of the artist you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.
Norman Mailer
One of the recognizable features of the authentic masterpiece is its capacity to renew itself to endure the loss of some kinds of immediate relevance while still answering the most important questions men can ask including new ones they are just learning how to frame.
Arnold Stein
As an artist grows older he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult as he had when a child.
Charles Burchfield
What's an artist but the dregs of his work - the human shambles that follows it around?
William Gaddis
Man in Canadian art is rarely in command of his environment or ever at home in it.
Elizabeth Kilbourn
Art gropes it stalks like a hunter lost in the woods listening to itself and to everything around it unsure of itself waiting to pounce.
John W. Gardner
Art is a delayed echo.
George Santayana
Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.
Ted Shawn
Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious individualistic unconventional sensitive irritable.
Robert Motherwell
A picture lives by companionship. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling.
Mark Rothko
All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.
Clement Greenberg
An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.
George Santayana
When power leads man toward arrogance poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his experience. When power corrupts poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgement. The artist. . . faithful to his personal vision of reality becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an offensive state.
John F Kennedy
Designers and free lance artists and editors can set their hourly rates by dividing their annual income needs by 1000.
Mike Rider
We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it.
Henry James
Theatre takes place all the time wherever one is and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.
John Cage
The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.
Eric Hoffer
Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
Susan Sontag
If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
George Santayana
I wonder whether Art has a higher function than to make me feel appreciate and enjoy natural objects for their art value?
Bernard Berenson
Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out while Romantic grows from outside in.
Ned Rorem
Artists by definition innocent don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.
Ned Rorem
Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees they must put their lives into the sting they give.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.
Ezra Pound
Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form - or else it is not art.
Jacques Barzun
An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.
Ben Shahn
Every story has three sides to it - yours mine and the facts.
Foster Meharny Russell
When we quarrel how we wish we had been blameless.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
I have never in my life learned anything from any man who agreed with me.
Dudley Field Malone