Henry James Quotes

Only art means anything.

We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe

Art is a sense of magic.

That's what art is. You don't make up stories. You live your life.

What would life be without art? Science prolongs life. To consist of what-eating, drinking, and sleeping? What is the good of living longer if it is only a matter of satisfying the requirements that sustain life? All this is nothing without the charm of art.

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.

Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.

Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.

A work of art is one of mystery, the one extreme magic; everything else is either arithmetic or biology.

O thou sculptor, painter, poet! Take this lesson to thy heart: That is best which lieth nearest; Shape from that thy work of art.

But ‘art’ is not anything serious or exclusive: it is the smell of oil paint, Henri Murger’s Vie de Boheme, corduroy trousers, the operatic Italian model: but the poetry, above all, of linseed oil and turpentine.

A work of art is a world in itself reflecting senses and emotions of the artist's world. Just as a flower, by virtue of its existence as a complete organism is both ornamental and self-sufficient as to color, form, and texture, so art, because of its singular existence is more than mere ornament.

You need the art in order to love the life.

The temple of art is built of words. Painting and sculpture and music are but the blazon of its windows, borrowing all their significance from the light, and suggestive only of the temple's uses.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

the arts are life accelerated and concentrated.

For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.

It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.

There is no surer method of evading the world than by following Art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by Art.

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

Music must take rank as the highest of the fine arts - as the one which, more than any other, ministers to the human spirit.

The job of art is to chase ugliness away.

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

I think that there is not really a difference between a 'Peanuts' and a beautiful Renaissance painting. There is something very romantic in the 'Peanuts' - it's at the same level of a novel or a Jane Austen story or a beautiful embroidered rose fabric. It is a piece of romanticism.