Henri Frederic Amiel Quotes

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.

Art is always kind of snooping and listening in.

An artist's business is only to see.

The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though unseen by the outward eye-not creation, but insight.

At the heart of art is learning to see

The source of genius is imagination alone, the refinement of the senses that sees what others do not see, or sees them differently.

The science is in knowing; the art in perceiving.

Imagination is a powerful force underlying all knowing

We are all visionaries, and what we see is our soul in things.

The discoverer and the poet are inventors; and they are so because their mental vision detects the unapparent, unsuspected facts, almost as vividly as ocular vision rests on the apparent and familiar.

Art is about paying attention.

Art like life is an open secret.

True poetry is truer than science, because it is synthetic, and seizes at once what the combination of all the sciences is able, at most, to attain as a final result.

I say half jokingly that photography is the most difficult of the arts. It does require a certain arrogance to see and to choose. I feel myself walking on a tightrope instead of on the ground.

Creativity is contagious. And so is banality. Criticism is an art in itself. Don't let the dullness around destroy the creativity within. T.S. Eliot said, "honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry." Good to remember.

There is creation in the eye.

This is the test and triumph of originality, not to show us what has never been, and what we may therefore very easily never have dreamt of, but to point out to us what is before our eyes and under our feet, though we have had no suspicion of its existence, for want of sufficient strength of intuition, of determined grasp of mind to seize and retain it.

We have to allow ourselves to see what there is to see, and we have to imagine.

Art is not about understanding, it’s about experience.

My genius is in my nostrils.

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

Vision is more than looking.