Eduard Hanslick Quotes

Art is a sense of magic.

As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.

Imaginative literature primarily pleases rather than teaches. It is much easier to be pleased than taught, but much harder to know why one is pleased. Beauty is harder to analyze than truth.

Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Art is everywhere, and everywhere is art.

It is not sufficient to see and to know the beauty of a work. We must feel and be affected by it.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

When you walk past a painting in a museum, if it doesn't make you feel something, then it's probably a failure.

Painting and sculpture help other people to see what a wonderful world we live in.

The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing.

The truth is that art does not teach; it makes you feel, and any teaching that may arise from the feeling is an extra, and must not be stressed too much. In the modern world, and in Canada as much as anywhere, we are obsessed with the notion that to think is the highest achievement of mankind, but we neglect the fact that thought untouched by feeling is thin, delusive, treacherous stuff.

One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin.

Beauty makes one lose one's head. Poetry is born of this decapitation

If the mystical lovers of the arts, who consider all criticism dissection and all dissection destruction of enjoyment, thought logically, an exclamation like "Goodness alive!" would be the best criticism of the most deserving work of art. There are critiques which say nothing but that, only they do so more extensively.

The first impression of a work of art is its otherness from reality.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

I'm a romantic. The impressionists have always been my favorites. I like prettiness - beauty, or what I perceive as beauty.

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

It's hard to explain your emotions when you see a work of art.

I think of art as the highest level of creativity. To me, it is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment.

The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.