Sublime

Plato sees art as therapeutic: it is the duty of poets and painters (and, nowadays, novelists, television producers and designers) to help us lead good lives.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art.

For property is poverty and fear; only to have possessed something and to have let go of it means carefree ownership. —RAINER MARIA RILKE

The art critic Robert Hughes once said, ‘The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.’

That the more a man looks at a thing, the less he can see it, and the more a man learns a thing the less he knows it.

Russell writes that “for hundreds of years, and on many matters of supreme importance, art had the edge over all other sources.” It gave out the truth about this world and the next one. It encapsulated history. It told us what people wiser than ourselves were thinking. It told the stories that everyone wanted to hear…answered the great riddles, fil

his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look,

It is no valid accusation against a poet that the sentiment he expresses is commonplace. Poetry is always commonplace; it is vulgar in the noblest sense of that noble word. Unless a man can make the same kind of ringing appeal to absolute and admitted sentiments that is made by a popular orator, he has lost touch with emotional literature.