Artistic Virtue Quotes

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

Good art however 'immoral' is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

It is with art as with love: How can a man of the world,with all his distractions, keep the inwardness which an artist must possess if he hopes to attain perfection? That inwardness which the spectator must share if he is to understand the work as the artist wishes and hopes... Believe me, talents are like virtues; either you must love them for their own sake or renounce them altogether. And they are only recognized and rewarded when we have practised them in secret, like a dangerous mystery."

The virtue of art lies in detachment, in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until one thing comes out from theconnection of things, there can be enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought.

A good drawing has immense vitality because it is explanatory. In a good drawing even its faults have become virtues.

People romanticize struggle and obscurity, and I get that, but it's a very one-dimensional argument to say that people who have money are evil, and artists who are poor are virtuous.

We are accustomed to the artist scoundrel or specialist in vice, and unaccustomed to the creator in whom passion and reason and moral integrity hold in balance. But greatness of intellect and feeling, or soul and conduct - magnanimity, in short - does occur; it is not a myth for boy scouts, and its reality is important, if only to give us the true range of the term "human," which we so regularly define by its lower reaches.

One of the most difficult tests for the creator: he must always remain unconscious, unaware of his best virtues, if he doesn't want to rob them of their candor and innocence.

After all, the supreme virtue in all art is soul, perhaps it is the only thing which gives art a right to be.

I think being tortured as a virtue is a kind of antiquated sense of what it is to be an artist. It comes out of that Symbolist idea, back to Rimbaud and all that disordering of the senses and all of that being some exalted state. When I've been that way, I've always been less exalted than I would have liked.