Henry Austin Dobson Quotes

Art is the closest you can get to immortality, though it's a poor substitute - you're working for people not yet born - and people want it because it is brilliant. It ends up in museums anyway; the rich have to give it back to the people, it's their only option. There are no pockets in a shroud.

I just want my music to measure up to. Part of it's just thinking about my place in history and how this music is going to be perceived, if it's listened to 30, 40 years from now.

Remember, we are mortal, but poetry is not.

High art alone is eternal and the bust outlives the city.

Our works in stone, in paint, in print, are spared, some of them, for a few decades or a millennium or two, but everything must finally fall in war, or wear away into the ultimate and universal ash - the triumphs, the frauds, the treasures and the fakes. A fact of life: we're going to die. "Be of good heart," cry the dead artists out of the living past. "Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing." Maybe a man's name doesn't matter all that much.

When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.

Art is longer than life.

I don't mind my work being a record of the time it was written in.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

All playwrights should be dead for three hundred years.

Art is man's distinctly human way of fighting death.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

I choose films for their artistic value. I don't need a mansion or a Jaguar. When I leave this Earth, I won't take any money with me. All I will leave behind will be my art.

Art is eternal, but life is short.

It may not be art, but it is history.

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

I'm glad I was part of history, here long after I'm gone.

High tech is for a short time. But art is forever. People still admire a Picasso or a Van Gogh. But they don't admire the steam locomotive anymore.

Monuments, like men, submit to fate.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine.

Blest be the art that can immortalize.

Artists who are relevant today won't be tomorrow unless someone does the right thing by their character and preserves it in the dialogue of a movie.

...Any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

They say that art should stand the test of time. Life lasts a limited amount of time. Mountains and trees and earth will outlive human beings, but we don't know if they will be here always. Art does outlast the life span of its maker. Art should communicate to an increasing circle of strangers-people who do not know the artist, but come to know the work, and through the work, come to know something about the humanity of the artist that rings with their own humanity.