“Art is born of humiliation.”
More from W. H. Auden on Art
“Of all possible subjects, travel is the most difficult for an artist, as it is the easiest for a journalist.”
“No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible.”
“A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.”
“Music is the best means we have of digesting time.”
“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.”
Others on Art
Picasso
18 quotes“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.”
Vincent van Gogh
13 quotes“Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.”
Michelangelo
12 quotes“Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.”
John Keats
10 quotes“With a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”
Susan Sontag
10 quotes“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”
Beethoven
8 quotes“Music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy.”
Percy Shelley
8 quotes“Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted”
Wallace Stevens
8 quotes“The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.”
Charles Baudelaire
8 quotes“The mixture of the grotesque and the tragic is agreeable to the spirit, as are discords to the jaded ear.”
Jackson Pollock
7 quotes“The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.”
W.H. Auden
7 quotes“Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
7 quotes“Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.”