“The identification of fantasy is always an attempt to avoid one's own suffering: the identification of art is the sharing in the suffering of another.”
More from W.H. Auden on Art
“Without art, we should have no notion of the sacred; without science, we should always worship false gods.”
“Drama is based on the Mistake.”
“Poetry might be defined as the clear expression of mixed feelings.”
“Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.”
“Poetry makes nothing happen.”
“The most exciting rhythms seem unexpected and complex, the most beautiful melodies simple and inevitable.”
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.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
7 quotes“Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.”
John Ruskin
7 quotes“All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another and is precious according to the greatness of...”