Art's everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.
The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.
First of all, the art of living; then as my ideal profession, poetry and philosophy, and as my real profession, plastic arts; in the last resort, for lack of income, illustrations.
The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
My music is all about an idealistic human personality. I have 19th-century ideals.
I have the loftiest idea, and the most passionate one, of art. Much too lofty to agree to subject it to anything. Much too passionate to want to divorce it from anything.
It is the mission of all art to express the highest and most beautiful ideals of man.
Perhaps art is a quest for the perfect, or even the imperfect. Reality always falls short on both sides.
All musicians start out with ideals but hanging on to them in the face of media scrutiny takes real integrity. Tougher still is to live up to the ideals of your dedicated fans.
It is sometimes said that the tragedy of an artist's life is that he cannot realise his ideal. But the true tragedy that dogs the steps of most artists is that they realise their ideal too absolutely. For, when the ideal is realised, it is robbed of its wonder and its mystery, and becomes simply a new starting-point for an ideal that is other than itself.
Concerts are never real music, you have to give up the idea of hearing in them all the most beautiful things of art.
Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we're trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn't.
I wrote on my desk wall when I was writing the film...'Art is socialism, but life is capitalism.' That's the hard thing in all of it if you expect to make a living.
The concepts of Joss are pure, and express attitudes and technical ideals.
Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.
Beauty and happiness and life are all the same and they are pervasive, unattached and abstract and they are our only concern. They are immeasurable, completely lacking in substance. They are perfect and sublime. This is the subject matter of art.
