W. Somerset Maugham Quotes

Beauty plus pity -- that is the closest we can get to a definition of art.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?

Art has nothing to do with taste. Art is not there to be tasted

Love and art do not embrace what is beautiful but what is made beautiful by this embrace.

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.

I like to aestheticize every possible thing that can be aestheticized.

In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

Beauty is altogether in the eye of the beholder.

The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way.

To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

Art evokes emotion. It doesn't have to be a thing of beauty.

If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.

The beauty of art is that it allows you to slow down, and for a moment, things that once seemed unfamiliar become precious to you.

I don't know if it's art, but I know I like it.

A work of art... is not a living thing... that walks or runs. But the making of a life. That which gives you a reaction. To some it is the wonder of man's fingers. To some it is the wonder of the mind. To some it is the wonder of technique. And to some it is how real it is. To some, how transcendent it is. Like the 5th Symphony, it presents itself with a feeling that you know it, if you have heard it once.

While art may instruct as well as please, it can nevertheless be true art without instructing, but not without pleasing.

The learned understand the reason of art; the unlearned feel the pleasure.

I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years--it took the experience of lived time--to realize that they really are the same thing.

Andrei, did you like the opera?" "Not particularly." "Andrei, do you see what you're missing?" "I don't think I do, Kira. It's all rather silly. And useless." "Can't you enjoy things that are useless, merely because they are beautiful?" "No. But I enjoyed it." "The music?" "No. The way you listened to it.

I don't know why people see the things that they do. I wouldn't pay to see them, they don't touch me or move me in any way.

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.

The sight of anything extremely beautiful, in nature or in art, brings back the memory of what one loves, with the speed of lightning.