“Flesh is willing, but the Soul requiresSisyphean patience for its song,Time, Hippocrates remarked, is shortand Art is long.”
More from Charles Baudelaire on Art
“The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.”
“The beautiful is always bizarre.”
“The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries with terror before being defeated.”
“Even in the centuries which appear to us to be the most monstrous and foolish, the immortal appetite for beauty has always found satisfaction.”
“Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.”
“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
“The study of beauty is a duel in which the artist cries out in terror before being vanquished.”
Others on Art
Picasso
18 quotes“I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.”
Vincent van Gogh
13 quotes“Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.”
Michelangelo
12 quotes“Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.”
John Keats
10 quotes“Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
Susan Sontag
10 quotes“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.”
Wallace Stevens
8 quotes“Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other peop...”
Percy Shelley
8 quotes“Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds.”
Beethoven
8 quotes“Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets, for it and knowledge can raise men to the divine.”
Steven Pressfield
7 quotes“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.”
John Ruskin
7 quotes“We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful...”
Ezra Pound
7 quotes“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.”
Marshall McLuhan
7 quotes“Art is anything you can get away with.”