“Music escapes from words: that is its purpose, and its majesty.”
More from Julian Barnes on Art
“Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time.”
“Opera cuts to the chase—as death does. An art which seeks, more obviously than any other form, to break your heart.”
“Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.”
“Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake.”
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.”
Susan Sontag
10 quotes“The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality and eventually in one's own.”
John Keats
10 quotes“Poetry should... should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.”
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.”
Charles Baudelaire
8 quotes“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.”
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.”
Ansel Adams
7 quotes“A photograph is usually looked at- seldom looked into.”
John Ruskin
7 quotes“We require from buildings two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful...”
Frank Lloyd Wright
7 quotes“Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.”