Daniel Bell Quotes

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden. It is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

There is probably nothing wrong with art for art's sake if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago.

Art for art's sake is dead, if it ever lived.

Although I do not care for the slogan "art for art's sake", there can be no question that what makes a work of fiction safe from larvae and rust is not its social importance but its art, only its art.

The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.

All art is quite useless.

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.

Art for art's sake, and creation for creation's sake, and love for love's sake

Art doesn't have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it.

Art can be very political but that can't be the purpose of art, it can't be the driving force. It isn't with any of the books that I love, anyway.

The most useful thing about art is it's uselessness.

I realize that every picture isn't a work of art.

Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts.

Art is Art. Everything else is everything else.

We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved - bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, A-R-T.

In my mind, the plays I was writing were extreme examples of art for art's sake. I didn't necessarily think that other people would love them, though I thought they probably would.

The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.

The entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful, or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects, either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one.

All art is contemporary, if it's alive, and if it's not alive, what's the point of it?

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.