False Art Quotes

Religion is simply art bastardized out of all recognition.

All false art, all vain wisdom, lasts its time but finally destroys itself, and its highest culture is also the epoch of its decay.

I am not fond of lengthy descriptions of phony artworks.

Concern for morality makes every work of the imagination false and stupid.

War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.

So I say, if you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it. It is not because the wretched thing is so ugly and silly and useless that I ask you to cast it from you; it is much more because these are but the outward symbols of the poison that lies within them; look through them and see all that has gone to their fashioning, and you will see how vain labour, and sorrow, and disgrace have been their companions from the first-and all this for trifles that no man really needs!

It is unhappily true that much insincere Literature and Art, executed solely with a view to effect, does succeed by deceiving the public.

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.