Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

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

Art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar. We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother tongue.

A woman is fascinated not by art but by the noise made by those in the field.

Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.

Nothing is as uplifting as standing before a great painting whether it was painted in 1505 or last Tuesday.

And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.

I never buy a piece of art. I don't see the point in buying something because I know my eyes will get bored of it eventually.

Those who are not very concerned with art want poems or pictures to record for them something they already know - as one might want a picture of a place he loves.

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

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.

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

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

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

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

I think that one of the most important things that art can do is give you a reason to look at something, almost give you permission to look at something.

A lot of people are intimated by art, but it's something to be revered beyond criticism.

I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.

The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.

I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

The object of art like every other product creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty.

Nobody is fully alive who cannot apply to art as much discrimination and appreciation as he applies to the work by which he earns his living.

Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.

Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.

The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.