High Art Quotes

Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended; and, in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of 'high art.' ~ Takashi Murakami

considering that lexicons and dictionaries are practically a high art form in German- speaking countries. The entry merges Essad Bey and Wolfgang von Weisl into one person. It explains that "Wolfgang (von) Weisl" also used the pseudonyms Leo Noussimbaum, Essad Bey, and Kurban Said - and hence the Austrian journalist, who otherwise had only a travel book and a book on Austrian artillery to his credit, suddenly was the prolific author of approximately twenty works of fiction and nonfiction ~ Tom Reiss

Intellectual culture seems to separate high art from low art. Low art is horror or pornography or anything that has a physical component to it and engages the reader on a visceral level and evokes a strong sympathetic reaction. High art is people driving in Volvos and talking a lot. I just don't want to keep those things separate. I think you can use visceral physical experiences to illustrate larger ideas, whether they're emotional or spiritual. I'm trying to not exclude high and low art or separate them. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

I have loads of issues with the way classical music is presented. It has been too reverential, too 'high art' - if you're not in the club, they're not going to let you join. It's like The Turin Shroud: don't touch it because it might fall apart. ~ Charles Hazlewood

No nation has ever produced great art that has not made a high art of cookery, because art appeals primarily to the senses. ~ Willa Cather

In France, Paul explained, good cooking was regarded as a combination of national sport and high art, and wine was always served with lunch and dinner. "The trick is moderation," he said. ~ Julia Child

When you're a little kid, you just like music that makes you happy and is fun. As you get older, you reach college or your 20s and you decide that music should be challenging and all art should be smart. So you start to think it makes you like high art more to put down things you consider low art. I don't even think things are low art. ~ Patrick Stump

It's art. And it makes people happy. And that's a very good thing. We have this problem in our culture. We take art that appeals to women - film, books, music - and we undervalue it. We assume it can't be high art. Especially if it's not dark and tortured and wailing. And it follows that much of that art is created by other women, and so we undervalue them as well. We wrap it up in a pretty pink package and resist calling it art. ~ Robinne Lee

At home, at school, among acquaintances, she had been used to have her conscious superiority admitted; and she had moved in a society where everything, from low arithmetic to high art, is of the amateur kind politely supposed to fall short of perfection only because gentlemen and ladies are not obliged to do more than they like - otherwise they would probably give forth abler writings and show themselves more commanding artists than any the world is at present obliged to put up with. ~ George Eliot

In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling. ~ Gore Vidal

In my twenties if even a tenth reading of Mallarmé failed to yield up its treasures, the fault was mine, not his. If my eyes swooned shut while I read The Sweet Cheat Gone, Proust's pacing was never called into question, just my intelligence and dedication and sensitivity. And I still entertain these sacralizing preconceptions about high art. I still admire what is difficult, though I now recognize it as a "period" taste and that my generation was the last to give a damn. Though we were atheists, we were, strangely enough, preparing ourselves for God's great Quiz Show; we had to know everything because we were convinced we would be tested on it - in our next life. ~ Edmund White

To say a compliment well is a high art and few possess it. ~ Mark Twain

He asked me, "Young man, do you love art? Great, lofty, immortal art?" I felt uncomfortable, and I replied that I did. That was a fatal mistake, because Volynsky put it this way: "If you love art, young man, how can you talk to me now about filthy lucre?"
He gave me a beautiful speech, itself an example of high art. It was passionate, inspired, a speech about great immortal art, and its point was that I shouldn't ask Volynsky for my pay. In doing so I defiled art, he explained, bringing it down to my level of crudity, avarice, and greed. Art was endangered. It could perish if I pressed my outrageous demands.
I tried to tell him that I needed the money. He replied that he couldn't imagine or understand how a man of the arts could be capable of speaking about such trivial aspects of life. He tried to shame me. But I held my own. ~ Dmitri Shostakovich

I love vast libraries; yet there is a doubt,
If one be better with them or without,
Unless he use them wisely, and, indeed,
Knows the high art of what and how to read. ~ John Godfrey Saxe

In Irish law, busking is considered vagrancy - you can be arrested for it. It's risky asking people for money in public. So it's not like it's a high-art job. And people who do it as a high-art job make very little money. ~ Glen Hansard

That's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed high art. We have the feelies and the scent organ instead. ~ Aldous Huxley

The novel is the first art form that is an honest-to-god commodity. That's what makes it different from both high art and folk art. ~ Leslie Fiedler

I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.' ~ Kevin Bleyer

I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, and likewise their disciples and apostles; - I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art; - I believe that this Art proceeds from God, and lives within the hearts of all illumined men; - I believe that he who once has bathed in the sublime delights of this high Art, is consecrate to Her for ever, and never can deny Her; - I believe that through Art all men are saved. ~ Richard Wagner

Some people thought I was using my popularity as a singer to sell my first novel. For others, it was almost a sacrilege: a practitioner of a minor art daring to enter the field of high art. ~ Chico Buarque

But my family has always stuck to fabrication, with the idea that you can be decent at two high art forms or you can excel at one. We excel. Excellently. ~ Laini Taylor

I'm an artist, and I love the visual. Fashion is high art sometimes and hack work other times, but it's something worthy of study and love. ~ Molly Crabapple

The films of Warhol, when they are about anything are about sucking people off. This can be high art, to people who are interested in sucking people off.
But that will not liberate Black people. ~ Amiri Baraka

... I believe there needs to be a striving to find the pure, unadulterated root of the great truths taught by the wisdom bringers, and an understanding of the principles of the Religion of the Sun, which gave rise to times of great peace, high art and literature, and a profound understanding of reality, perennial wisdom, advances in civilization and most importantly of all, the spiritual transformation of the individual. It is when these principles are lost that civilization falls into decay, and it can't hope to regain any of its former glory, without understanding and adhering to them. ~ Lara Atwood

Toronto may be the only city where novels are integral to high art, the alternative scene and mainstream culture all at the same time. ~ Stephen Marche

On the level of high art, in their common efforts to express human truths, relationships, attitudes, and personal visions, children's literature and adult literature meet and sometimes merge, and we wonder then whether a given work is truly for children or truly for grown-ups. The answer, of course, is: for both. ~ Lloyd Alexander

Ultimately, I want a peak experience in reading, and that is sometimes difficult to find in contemporary fiction. I'm not interested in books that are just clever and well executed; polish doesn't impress me, and I don't care about a merely capable sentence. Life is short; I want a confrontation with high art. I want soul. Great literature rattles the mind and makes the body sing. It's an unmistakable, electric feeling, and too rare. That is what I want. ~ C.E. Morgan

If I hear dance music, my body starts to move. Whatever the dance music is, I can't help it. With all that, I still felt, well, rock is a little higher art, but it wasn't. Right now, because I have so much experience with dance charts, I started to realize that it's incredible art. This is going to be known one day as high art. ~ Yoko Ono

High art alone is eternal and the bust outlives the city. ~ Theophile Gautier

I didn't want to make 'high' art, I had no interest in using paint, I wanted to find something that anyone could relate to without knowing about contemporary art. I wasn't thinking in terms of precious prints or archival quality; I didn't want the work to seem like a commodity. ~ Cindy Sherman

Woe is me! how high art Thou in the highest, and how deep in the deepest! and Thou never departest, and we scarcely return to Thee. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

self-annihilation is necessary for high art ~ Kunal Sen

You're the Dentonville High art teacher?"

She couldn't help feeling defensive at his derisive tone. "Yes, and I love my job."

"Do you? Or have you never moved beyond your high school life?"

- Zane's Art ~ Sara Daniel

This is the dialectic - there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains an element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art. ~ Douglas Sirk

It is only the educated who can produce or appreciate high art. ~ Margaret Of Valois

Jane Austen makes me detest all her characters, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her characters up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worthwhile, too. Some day I might examine the other end of her books and see. ~ Mark Twain

There is no real way to categorize McLean's 'American Pie' for its hybrid of modern poetry and folk ballad, beer-hall chant and high-art rock. ~ Douglas Brinkley

There are only three forms of high art: the symphony, the illustrated children's book and the board game. ~ Brian K. Vaughan

Border crossing' is a recurrent theme in all aspects of my work -- editing, writing, and painting. I'm interested in the various ways artists not only cross borders but also subvert them. In mythology, the old Trickster figure Coyote is a champion border crosser, mischievously dashing from the land of the living to the land of the dead, from the wilderness world of magic to the human world. He tears things down so they can be made anew. He's a rascal, but also a culture hero, dancing on borders, ignoring the rules, as many of our most innovative artists do. I'm particularly drawn to art that crosses the borders critics have erected between 'high art' and 'popular culture,' between 'mainstream' and 'genre,' or between one genre and another -- I love that moment of passage between the two; that place on the border where two worlds meet and energize each other, where Coyote enters and shakes things up. But I still have a great love for traditional fantasy, for Imaginary World, center-of-the-genre stories. I'm still excited by series books and trilogies if they're well written and use mythic tropes in interesting ways. ~ Terri Windling

Gods cracked, Freyrík, they would have raped me!" He surged forward so suddenly Freyrík flinched and tripped away. "And no, I did not incite or invite their attentions. It is your people who paint me like a harlot and parade me round half-naked, your people who find it amusing to use my brethren like toys, your people who teach their children such high art of disrespect that boys think rape a pleasant way to pass an afternoon! ~ Rachel Haimowitz

I have a high art, I hurt with cruelty those who would damage me. ~ Archilochus

It may well be, of course, that America's pop culture is on balance better than our high art. I don't think so, but you can certainly make a case that the best of it aspires to a degree of aesthetic and emotional seriousness that is directly comparable to all but the very greatest works of high art. ~ Terry Teachout

High art consists neither in altering, nor in improving nature; but in seeking throughout nature for 'whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are pure;' in loving these, in displaying to the utmost of the painter's power such loveliness as is in them, and directing the thoughts of others to them by winning art, or gentle emphasis. ~ John Ruskin

Magic happens when the wand of language strikes a stone and makes it melt, touches a spindle and turns it into gold, or taps a trunk and makes it fly. By drawing on a syntax of enchantment that conjures fluidity, ethereality, flimsiness, and transparency, writers turn solidity into resplendent airy lightness to produce miracles of linguistic transubstantiation.

What is the effect of that beauty? How do readers respond to words that create that beauty? In a world that has discredited that particular attribute and banished it from high art, beauty has nonetheless held on to its enlivening power in children's books. It draws readers in, then draws them to understand the fictional worlds it lights up. ~ Maria Tatar

To see the butcher slap the steak before he laid it on the block, and give his knife a sharpening, was to forget breakfast instantly. It was agreeable too - it really was - to see him cut it off so smooth and juicy. There was nothing savage in the act, although the knife was large and keen; it was a piece of art, high art; there was delicacy of touch, clearness of tone, skilful handling of the subject, fine shading. It was the triumph of mind over matter; quite. ~ Charles Dickens

The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Maybe all men are a drug. Sometimes they bring you down and sometimes, like now, they get you so high. ~ Candace Bushnell

O woman, thou art my imperfection! ~ Pawan Mishra

The verb 'to darn' is explained in my pocket dictionary as follows: 'To mend by imitating the texture of the stuff, with thread and needle.' But this definition does not correspond to the work accomplished by good Chinese housewives. When they mend a sock, they do not try 'to imitate the texture of the stuff'. Their art makes no attempt at concealment: it even takes a certain pride in revealing itself. ~ Daniele Vare

Translation is the art of failure. ~ Umberto Eco

I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists. ~ Dave Hickey

We have a lot of rhetoric today about "high rigor" and you often hear terms like that thrown about when discussing the Common Core. But the American education system historically has not embraced intellectual seriousness. ~ Dana Goldstein

The spirit of the Olympic movement is great for young people because it teaches them about the training and discipline required to compete. Even if they don't make the teams, they can rededicate their lives to the art of sport, discipline, and physical fitness. ~ Richard M. Daley

The internet is killing the art of writing. The big "publish" button begs you to publish even before you go back and make one single edit, and as if this was not enough, you have instant readers who praise your writing skills!- ~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

You removed my spectacles!"
A disbelieving snort of laughter escaped him. "The way you're taking on, you'd have thought I removed
your clothing!"
Samantha clutched at the high-necked bodice of her homely bottle-green day dress. "How do I know
you didn't?"
Silence hung between them, thicker than the heated air. Then his smoky voice dipped into low and
dangerous territory. "If I had removed your clothing, Miss Wickersham, I can assure you it would have
been worth waking up for. ~ Teresa Medeiros

Habakkuk 3:19 says that the way we develop hind's feet (a hind is an animal that can climb mountains swiftly) is "to walk [not to stand still in terror, but to walk] and make [spiritual] progress upon" the "high places [of trouble, suffering or responsibility]!" The way God helps us make spiritual progress is by being with us to strengthen and encourage us to "keep on keeping on" in rough times. It's easy to quit; it takes faith to go through. ~ Joyce Meyer

I think what art is always doing is making us see the world so differently, and I don't mean just colors and light, but re-thinking relationships, spatial relationships, psychological relationships ... those who gravitate to the art world actually want to be puzzled. ~ Roselee Goldberg

I was a very awkward high schooler, especially in early high school. ~ Aaron Tveit

The future - what should I do with the future? I felt like one who has climbed the brow of a great hill, and finds only a sea of mist beyond. Go forward I must; but to what goal? With what aim? With what hopes? My father had already distinctly forbidden me to adopt art as a profession. My sister, by ignoring all the purport of my last letter, as distinctly signified her own contempt for that which was to me as the life of my life. Neither loved me; both had wounded me bitterly; and I now, almost for the first time, distinctly saw how difficult a struggle lay before me.
"If I become a painter," I thought, "I become so in defiance of my family; and, defying them, am alone in the wide world evermore. If, on the contrary, I yield and obey, what manner of life lies before me? The hollow life of fashionable society, into which I shall be carried as a marriageable commodity, and where I shall be expected to fulfil my duty as a daughter by securing a wealthy husband as speedily as possible.
Alas! alas! what an alternative! Was it for this that I had studied and striven? Was it for this that I had built such fairy castles, and dreamt such dreams? ~ Amelia B. Edwards

Elderly people are like plants. Whereas some go to seed, or to pot, others blossom in the most wonderful ways. I believe beauty competitions should be held only for people over seventy years of age. When we are young, we have the face and figure God gave us. We did nothing to earn our good looks. But as we get older, character becomes etched on our face. Beautiful old people are works of art. Like a white candle in a holy place, so it the beauty of an aged face. ~ James Simpson

Art is the proper task of life. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I'm from the beatnik generation, where everybody wanted to be a poet or writer or something. And at that time, I was a jazz critic, and I was always thinking, theorizing about what makes great art or what's important in art. ~ Harvey Pekar

One mark of a great soldier is that he fight on his own terms or fights not at all. ~ Sun Tzu

Build your cities proud and high. Lay your sewers. Span your rivers. Work feverishly. Sleep dreamlessly. Sing madly, like the bulbul. Underneath, below the deepest foundations, there lives another race of men. They are dark, sombre, passionate. They muscle into the bowels of the earth. They wait with a patience which is terrifying. They are the scavengers. They emerge when everything topples into dust. ~ Henry Miller

A puzzle with a solution is a game. A puzzle without a solution is a work of art. ~ Marty Rubin

So we start with an oversignifying reader. Those texts that appear to reward this reader for this additional investment - text that we find exceptionally suggestive, apposite, or musical - are usually adjudged to be 'poetic' ... The work of the poet is to contribute a text that will firstly invite such a reading; and secondly reward such a reading. ~ Don Paterson

Connoisseurs think the art is already done. ~ John Constable

I'd have to say that the things that mean the most to me are the examples of original comic art that I'm able to look at every day, most of them either by notable friends and/or for projects that I've worked on. ~ Chip Kidd

I shall go so far that people will be seized with terror at the sight of each of my works of 'living' art. ~ Egon Schiele

It hardly needs explaining at length, I think, how much authority or beauty is added to style by the timely use of proverbs. In the first place who does not see what dignity they confer on style by their antiquity alone? ... And so to interweave adages deftly and appropriately is to make the language as a whole glitter with sparkles from Antiquity, please us with the colours of the art of rhetoric, gleam with jewel-like words of wisdom, and charm us with titbits of wit and humour. ~ Desiderius Erasmus

You are the birthplace of your own art. Always and forever. Which means you are the art itself. ⠀
⠀
And that is fucking beautiful. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc

Activity
in the Sun
reaches its
highest point
once every 11
years. Throughout
this period, the
Sun rains high
energy particles
and radiation
down on
Earth. ~ Harun Yahya

Fall the deep curtains,
delicate the weave,
fair the thread. ~ Hilda Doolittle

But will you not have a house to care for? Meals to cook? Children whining for this or that? Will you have time for the work?" "I'll make time," I promised. "The house will not always be so clean, the cooking may be a little hasty, and the whining children will sit on my lap and I'll sing to them while I work. ~ Gloria Whelan

Music brought the war in Vietnam right into our bedrooms. Songs we heard from America made us interested in politics; they were history lessons in a palatable, exciting form. We demonstrated against the Vietnam and Korean wars, discussed sexual liberation, censorship and pornography and read books by Timothy Leary, Hubert Selby Jr (Last Exit to Brooklyn) and Marshall McLuhan because we'd heard all these people referred to in songs or interviews with musicians. [...] Music, politics, literature, art all crossed over and fed into each other. There were some great magazines around too [...] Even though we couldn't afford to travel, we felt connected to other countries because ideas and events from those places reached us through music and magazines. ~ Viv Albertine

Everywhere I went, in every country, people complained about their education system. It was a universal truth and a strangely reassuring one. No one was content, and rightly so. Educating all kids to high levels was hard, and every country - every one - still had work to do. ~ Amanda Ripley

It's time now to rent a car, roll down the windows and prepare for your first big thrill: the freeways. They're so much fun they should charge admission. Never fret about zigzagging back and forth through six lanes of traffic at high speeds; it erases jet lag in a split second.
You're now heading toward Hollywood, like any normal tourist. Breathe in that smog and feel lucky that only in L.A. will you glimpse a green sun or a brown moon. Forget the propaganda you've heard about clean air; demand oxygen you can see in all its glorious discoloration. ~ John Waters

It's a besetting sin of the family. Uncle Hart had his own personal brothel at my age, where he trained ladies in the art of exquisite pleasure. He trained them, not the other way around, the pompous bastard. Dad had his own racing stable, Uncle Mac was already a celebrated artist with a scandalous marriage. I'm a bit late in the proceedings for a Mackenzie. ~ Jennifer Ashley

Sometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art. ~ Jeanette Winterson

You don't learn art from life, or life from art. ~ Marty Rubin

Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste. ~ Charlotte Bronte

Teenage years are hard. And, having taught high school for a number of years, I think they're particularly hard on teenage girls. The most self-conscious human beings on the planet are teenage girls. ~ Rob Thomas

That's pretty profound if you think about it. However low you are, there is always something to feel proud of, and however high you are, there is always something to humble you. I hold on to that this day. ~ Megyn Kelly

The way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas. ~ Linus Pauling

The attractiveness of a woman to a man is based in limitation and immobilization.

Feeders like women so fat, they can't move, and depend on him for the simplest things.

Men like women who are young, or have low self-esteem, so he can convince her she is lucky someone gave her the privilege of being acknowledged or used for sex.

Men like; high heels, so she can't run. Tight clothes, so she can't move. Youth, so she doesn't know better. Hair, artificial nails, and make-up, to prevent her from doing basic enjoyable things.

And this is what they call, "femininity". The entire concept is rooted in misogyny and control. ~ Sasha Scarr

Beautiful and minimalist, the traditional Japanese art of ikebana - arranging bouquets of cut flowers and leaves using very few elements - ideally corresponded to a form of expression I could transpose in a perfume. The smell of a rose early in the morning, damp, sprinkled with dew, delicate and light. ~ Jean-Claude Ellena

I would expect an extremely high percentage of the chickens would test positive. Our poultry industry clients wouldn't like that. ~ Bryan Shelton

I thought I'd pay you a visit, my dear. Since you're so interesting."
My mouth shifted into high gear, leaving my brain behind. "You know, you're the second guy in a few days to call me that. You should be more creative. ~ Lilith Saintcrow

I am first and foremost a musician, although those of us who live elsewhere still dream about the inspirational qualities of Australia and its ravishing transcendental beauty. ~ Roger Woodward