Maxfield Parrish Quotes

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.

Criticism is the windows and chandeliers of art: it illuminates the enveloping darkness in which art might otherwise rest only vaguely discernible, and perhaps altogether unseen.

Art is a gift and if nobody hears it, that doesn't make it any less of a gift.

You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

Everything that is made beautiful and fair and lovely is made for the eye of one who sees.

I have to say that I reject somewhat the distinction between something called art and something called public art. I think all art demands and desires to be seen.

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

Here's what I just realized: A world in which sport at its best is not seen as some kind of art is a world that doesn't deserve any art.

To form our taste, we must neither depreciate nor imitate, but we should understand and originate.

It takes little talent to see what lies under one's nose, a good deal to know in what direction to point that organ.

My books are like water; those of the great geniuses are wine. (Fortunately) everybody drinks water.

A painting is like a man. If you can live without it, then there isn't much point in having it.

There is something that is much more scarce, something finer far, something rarer than ability. It is the ability to recognize ability.

There are a lot of bad films out there. There's a lot of bad architecture out there, and I think sometimes it takes a lot of time to begin to see what's really good. And I think what the test seems to be is, what really sticks with you. And what really becomes a part of your life.

Creative things have to sell to get acknowledged as such.

It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of [a work], outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits. At the one extreme some works of genius would be sure to miss appreciation. Their very novelty would make them repulsive until the public had learned the new language in which their author spoke.

You can't buy vision, and you can't buy aesthetic.

I think, as long as people are doing their craft at a high level, I'm going to have respect for it and find something that appeals to me.

The audience is my hardest and best critic.

There are lots of artists I respect and admire.

Just because you like something, that doesn't mean that you have a feel for it.

Art cannot be separated from life. It is the expression of the greatest need of which life is capable, and we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life's experience.

Any man who can write a page of living prose adds something to our life, and the man who can, as I can, is surely the last to resent someone who can do it even better. An artist cannot deny art, nor would he want to. A lover cannot deny love.

What the work of art looks like isn't too important.

Saying that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic worth, is like saying that he had rheumatism or suffered from diabetes. Madness, in fact, is a medical term that can claim no more notice from the objective critic than he grants the charge of heresy raised by the theologian, or the charge of immorality raised by the police.