Quotations

Remarks poets made beyond their poems — letters, journals, conversation — gathered as a readable library. Browse by topic or author, or search the words themselves. Currently 7,145 active remarks.

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Topic: Art

Showing 24 of 1,444 · page 4 of 61

“Whoever wants to make something great must have developed his education to such a degree that he can raise lesser reality to the height of his spirit.”

Original: Wer aber etwas Großes machen will, muß seine Bildung so gesteigert haben, daß er gleich den Griechen imstande sei, die geringere reale Natur zu der Höhe seines Geistes heranzuheben. — Goethe sees artistic greatness as the transformation of observed reality through cultivated intelligence. · Conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann, 20 October 1828 (German)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“One must be something in order to make something.”

Original: Man muß etwas sein, um etwas zu machen. — Great creative work requires the inner development of the person who undertakes it. · Conversation with Johann Peter Eckermann, 20 October 1828 (German)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“There is nothing more terrible than imagination without taste.”

Original: Es ist nichts fürchterlicher als Einbildungskraft ohne Geschmack. — Imagination needs judgement and taste if creativity is not to become excess. · Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years (German)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I am dead tired of their bello and bellezza.”

A comic expression of Joyce’s exasperation with what he regarded as stereotypical Italian aestheticism. · Letter concerning Italy

“What did they do but illustrate a page or so of the New Testament!”

Joyce’s deliberately outrageous dismissal of Italian art is characteristic of his polemical humour. · Letter concerning Italian art

“I hate to think that Italians ever did anything in the way of art.”

An intentionally exaggerated complaint revealing Joyce’s capacity for comic hyperbole. · Letter concerning Italy

“I dislike to hear of any stray heroics on the prowl for me.”

A dry dismissal of romanticised ideas about the suffering artist. · Letter concerning his writing

“I am not likely to die of bashfulness but neither am I prepared to be crucified to attest the perfection of my art.”

Joyce rejects both timidity and the cult of artistic perfection. · Letter concerning his writing

“The artist should be a passive rather than an active member of the State, having at his disposal the agency of beauty and not politics.”

Joyce argues for the autonomy of art from direct political action. · Political and critical writing

“Some day I will expand that sentence into a treatise.”

A playful glimpse of Joyce’s ambition to develop his aesthetic ideas systematically. · Aesthetic discussion in Stephen Hero

“The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance.”

Joyce invokes Aquinas in explaining the principles underlying his aesthetic thinking. · Aesthetic discussion in Stephen Hero, quoting Aquinas

“The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action.”

Joyce turns attention from inherited theory towards the actual experience of perceiving art. · Aesthetic discussion in Stephen Hero

“No esthetic theory, pursued with the aid of tradition, is of any value.”

Joyce resists aesthetic systems that merely inherit assumptions from earlier traditions. · Aesthetic discussion in Stephen Hero

“The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.”

Joyce’s famous formulation of artistic detachment and the invisible creator. · Aesthetic discussion in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The artist has at his disposal the agency of beauty and not politics to better and save the world.”

Joyce assigns art a distinctive power rather than asking it to become political propaganda. · Political and critical writing

“The artist should be a passive rather than an active member of the State.”

Joyce distinguishes the artist’s cultural function from direct political activism. · Political and critical writing

“It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience.”

Joyce associates mature artistic discipline with patience and composure. · Essay on art and literature

“Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind.”

Joyce defines classicism as an enduring artistic attitude rather than a historical fashion. · Essay on art and literature

“A Classical style is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another.”

Joyce presents classicism as a disciplined method of artistic transformation. · Essay on art and literature

“Madness, in fact, is a medical expression to which a balanced critic should pay no more heed than he would to the accusation of heresy brought by the theologian.”

A defence of artistic judgement against simplistic labels. · Lecture, Realism and Idealism in English Literature, 1912

“To say that a great genius is half-mad, while recognizing his artistic prowess, is worth as much as saying that he was rheumatic, or that he suffered from diabetes.”

Joyce attacks the tendency to reduce artistic genius to a medical diagnosis. · Lecture, Realism and Idealism in English Literature, 1912

“Poetry, even when apparently most fantastic, is always a revolt against artifice, a revolt, in a sense, against actuality.”

A provocative definition of poetry as resistance to conventional reality. · Lecture, James Clarence Mangan, 1902

“Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.”

A concise formulation of Joyce’s early aesthetic theory. · Notebook entry, Paris, 28 March 1903

“The critic is surely himself a literary creator, and his work starts with a spontaneous surge of piety, and is inducted by the contagion of art into a composition of his own.”

He gives literary criticism a creative dignity, describing the critic as an artist responding to art. · Essay, Criticism, Inc.

John Crowe Ransom