Alain de Botton Quotes

Take Damien Hirst out of contemporary art history, and there's an incredible void. Great artists, like great people, have second acts.

Who's to say what will one day appear to have been trendsetting? Sometimes artists who receive breathless acclaim initially, seem to conk out. Other artists who don't register so keenly at the time, prove to be trailblazers.

A king or a prince becomes by accident a part of history. A poet or an artist becomes by nature and necessity a part of universal humanity.

I didn't come after Elvis and Dylan, I've been around always. But if I see or meet a great artist, I love 'em.

Dead he is not, but departed, for the artist never dies.

Artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilization’s anchor. We are the compass for humanity’s conscience.

A people may become great through many means, but there is only one measure by which its greatness is recognized and acknowledged. The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and art they have produced.... No people that has produced great literature and art has ever been looked upon by the world as distinctly inferior.

I still hope that more people can create art, even though artistic genres may never be the most popular or money-making genres. But the thing is, I think art is more long-lasting. It stays in people, and it changes them.

To have read the greatest works of any great poet, to have beheld or heard the greatest works of any great painter or musician, is a possession added to the best things of life.

At some future time I shall see New York the artist's ground. I think you will create an American School.

Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.

Art is the signature of a generation; artists have a way of defining the times.

Nobody cares much at heart about Titian, only there is a strange undercurrent of everlasting murmur about his name, which means the deep consent of all great men that he is greater than they.

What we hope for from the artist is help in discovering the significance of a place. In this sense we would choose in most respects for thirty minutes with Edward Hopper’s painting Sunday Morning to thirty minutes on the street that was his subject; with Hopper’s vision we see more.

I’ve been looking at oil paintings from oriental artists lately, and the one artist who’s inspired me right now is a man named Hokusai and I’ve had his book by my bed looking at how he interprets landscapes – mountains and water and flowers and birds.

My mother photographed Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas, right before he passed away. He was actually the first artist whose work I collected. I just loved the photographs that my mom had done of Donald Judd and the installations in Marfa.

In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.

The quality of our lives is diminished every time we lose a great artist.

The only happy artist is a dead artist, because only then you can't change. After I die, I'll probably come back as a paintbrush.

For now the poet cannot die, Nor leave his music as of old, But round him ere he scarce be cold Begins the scandal and the cry.

I am still so proud to have been a part of something that introduced theater to so many people who weren't exposed to it before. We took Broadway and put it in peoples' living rooms once a week for two seasons. People still come up to me in the street and say, 'I never went to theater before I saw "Smash.'" That's the greatest compliment.

Artists die twice. First creatively. Then physically. The second one is the easiest.

I like a lot of artists but I think the one that touched me the most was probably Tupac, coming up. Cause that was my generation, so Tupac was mine.

The great thing is anytime you see an artist that has a piece of what I've already done, you can see it from afar. 'He's doing that lil' hammer right there' - whether it's the energy, the swag or the look - it's a blessing.

A civilization is as great as its dreams, and its dreams are dreamt by artists.