“Poetry involves the mysteries of the irrational perceived through rational words.”
More from Vladimir Nabokov on Art
“You forget, my good man, that what the artist perceives is, primarily, the difference between things. It is the vulgar who note their resemblance.”
“Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.”
“while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.”
“A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.”
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.”