“If you introduce the human figure you at once arouse either disgust or desire.”
More from E.M. Forster on Art
“A matter neither sensual nor sensational is ignored by the art of today.”
“A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.”
“A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.”
“To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.”
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...”
Charles Baudelaire
8 quotes“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
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.”
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.”