Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed that by what it achieved.

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake.

What is important, then, is not that the critic should possess a correct abstract definition of beauty for the intellect, but a certain kind of temperament, the power of being deeply moved by the presence of beautiful objects.

That sense of a life in natural objects, which in most poetry is but a rhetorical artifice, was, then, in Wordsworth the assertion of what was for him almost literal fact.

The various forms of intellectual activity which together make up the culture of an age, move for the most part from different starting-points, and by unconnected roads.

Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening.

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.

And the fifteenth century was an impassioned age, so ardent and serious in its pursuit of art that it consecrated everything with which art had to ad as a religious object.

Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have.

Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us.

Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.

One of the most beautiful passages of Rousseau is that in the sixth book of Confessions, where he describes the awakening in him of the literary sense. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.

Philosophical theories or ideas, as points of view, instruments of criticism, may help us to gather up what might otherwise pass unregarded by us.

In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike.

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.

A very intimate sense of the expressiveness of outward things, which ponders, listens, penetrates, where the earlier, less developed consciousness passed lightly by, is an important element in the general temper of our modern poetry.

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.

Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it.

A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to to be seen in them by the finest senses?

The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit, is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.

Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end.

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was, in many things, great rather by what it designed then by what it achieved.

With myself, how to pass time becomes sometimes the question - unavoidably, though it strikes me as a thing unspeakably sad in a life so short as ours.

With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.

Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

The principal rule of art is to please and to move. All the other rules were created to achieve this first one.

I grew up with art from the innocent age of ten - with art, but with no sense of identity.

One does not devote one's life in art to shock an audience.

The other great development has been in photography, but that too was influenced by Conceptual art.

My art became very public.

Riding a race bike is an art - a thing that you do because you feel something inside.

The idea is, if I can't heal from my art, then how can you heal?

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

One does not need buildings, money, power, or status to practice the Art of Peace. Heaven is right where you are standing, and that is the place to train.

I don't believe in art. I believe in artists.

Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

We have often been attracted to the story of the other, the outcast. And he and I just loved working together, so it just kept happening, and our relationship is completely bound up with our work. We enjoy each other's art.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

It is veneer, rouge, aestheticism, art museums, new theaters, etc. that make America impotent. The good things are football, kindness, and jazz bands.

At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.

Art is an expression of who you are. Parts that I play are my sculptures.

There has always been quite a strong black and white art tradition in Australia, with quite a large contingent of cartoonists, given the size of the population.