So I say, if you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it. It is not because the wretched thin...g is so ugly and silly and useless that I ask you to cast it from you; it is much more because these are but the outward symbols of the poison that lies within them; look through them and see all that has gone to their fashioning, and you will see how vain labour, and sorrow, and disgrace have been their companions from the first--and all this for trifles that no man really needs!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in ...a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control o...ver what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is t...o things made by his art.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art--that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, express...ed by every means available to the arts.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to th...e natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »