Joseph Joubert Quotes

Sometimes my art is just an illusion - or is it?

You know what ART stands for? Above Real Truth.

Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth.

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Every painted image of something is also about the absence of the real thing. All painting is about the presence of absence.

A work of art works because it is true, not because it is real.

Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth.

Art has become more than painting, sculpture or music: art is more than Van Gogh painting a landscape or Wagner composing an opera. The whole of reality itself has become the object of art.

The only principle in art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal.

Art has absolutely no existence as veracity, as truth.

Art is a never-ending dance of illusions.

Art is not a reflection of reality, it is the reality of a reflection.

A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.

By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which is ugly, and it is only the ugly that is universal.

Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else.

In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false.

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

Painting is an illusion, a piece of magic, so what you see is not what you see.

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

There is no work of art that has ever been made that is absolutely truthful about life.

What is art but a way of seeing?

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent.

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

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