George Henry Lewes Quotes

Art is truth.

You don't eat a painting of an apple; you don't find it morally good. Instead, it tells you something strange about apples in themselves.

Artwork is a representation of our devotion to life.

For me, art is always a kind of theater.

We want people to experience art and think about it. The art reflects our time, it is about our culture.

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together, in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons.

Great art picks up where nature ends.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

Anything that reflects the human condition back on humans in the entertainment medium is art.

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

To put down an ideogram of a table so that people will recognize it as a table is not the work of a painter, but to sense it for a moment as a magic carpet with a leg hanging down at each corner is the beginning of a painter's imagination.

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

In the final analysis, a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better.

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

The office of poetry is not to make us think accurately, but feel truly.

The world doesn't need an artist who shows reality as it is.

Cinema and the arts invite viewers to focus on a story and, in doing so, peel away its layers and peer into the depths of the human soul.

When you draw or paint a tree, you do not imitate the tree; you do not copy it exactly as it is, which would be mere photography. To be free to paint a tree or a flower or a sunset, you have to feel what it conveys to you: the significance, the meaning of it.

Art points to things. It's a way of giving people not the standard way of looking at the world.

If you look at ancient Chinese paintings, you see mountains, but they are not real mountains; it is something the artists imagined.