Quotes About Poetry And Painting

“The arts which need interpretation are the arts of time
music and poetry
and not the arts of space
sculpture and painting.”

— Salvador De Madariaga

“The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.”

— John Adams

“It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about ... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.”

— Werner Herzog

“To his surprise he also discovered that it was possible to be good at what you had little interest in, just as it had been possible to be bad at something, whether painting or poetry, that you cared about a great deal.”

— Richard Russo

“Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.”

— Simonides

“What makes a poem a poem, finally, is that it is unparaphrasable. There is no other way to say exactly this; it exists only in its own body of language, only in these words. I may try to explain it or represent it in other terms, but then some element of its life will always be missing.
It's the same with painting. All I can say of still life must finally fall short; I may inventory, weigh, suggest, but I cannot circumscribe; some element of mystery will always be left out. What is missing is, precisely, its poetry.”

— Mark Doty

“Level, they use this as a poor excuse to disregard the rules of the sharia. Drinking, dancing, music, poetry, and painting”

— Elif Shafak

“Theophilus Crowe wrote bad free-verse poetry and played a jimbai drum while sitting on a rock by the ocean. He could play sixteen chords on the guitar and knew five Bob Dylan songs all the way through, allowing for a dampening buzz any time he had to play a bar chord. He had tried his hand at painting, sculpture, and pottery and had even played a minor part in the Pine Cove Little Theater's revival of Arsenic and Old Lace. In all of these endeavors, he had experienced a meteoric rise to mediocrity and quit before total embarrassment and self-loathing set in. Theo was cursed with an artist's soul but no talent. He possessed the angst and the inspiration, but not the means to create.”

— Christopher Moore

“Painting is silent poetry,
and poetry is painting that speaks.”

— Plutarch

“How many people have stopped playing guitar, writing poetry, or painting watercolors-activities packed with flow triggers-because these are also activities that do not squarely fit into culturally acceptable responsibility categories like "career" or "children"?”

— Steven Kotler

“I was influenced by surrealist poetry and painting as were thousands of other people, and it seems to me to have become a part of the way I write, but it's not.”

— Kenneth Koch

“I liked painting and drawing, and I liked humanities mainly - poetry, literature - this speculative attitude toward life.”

— Rafael Moneo

“Especially in the world today, where science rightfully is so important in terms of technology, innovation, telecom, Internet, fighting diseases, I think it's equally important that poetry and painting have their share of support.”

— Leon Black

“The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery.
Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream.”

— Anaïs Nin

“When superstition is allowed to perform the task of old age in dulling the human temperament, we can say goodbye to all excellence in poetry, in painting, and in music.”

— Denis Diderot

“Oratory is the masterful art. Poetry, painting, music, sculpture, architecture please, thrill, inspire - but oratory rules. The orator dominates those who hear him, convinces their reason, controls their judgment, compels their action. For the time being, he is master.”

— David Josiah Brewer

“There are certain things in which mediocrity is not to be endured, such as poetry, music, painting, public speaking.”

— Jean De La Bruyere

“I sincerely believe that the best criticism is the criticism that is entertaining and poetic; not a cold analytical type of criticism, which, claiming to explain everything, is devoid of hatred and love, and deliberately rids itself of any trace of feeling, but, since a fine painting is nature reflected by an artist, the best critical study, I repeat, will be the one that is that painting reflected by an intelligent and sensitive mind. Thus the best accounts of a picture may well be a sonnet or an elegy ... But that type of criticism is destined for books of poetry and for readers of poetry. As to criticism proper, I hope philosophers will understand what I am about to say: to be in focus, in other words to justify itself, criticism must be partial, passionate, political, that is to say it must adopt an exclusive point of view, provided always the one adopted opens up the widest horizons.”

— Charles Baudelaire

“A man of eighty has outlived probably three new schools of painting, two of architecture and poetry and a hundred in dress.”

— Lord Byron

“Poetry fettered, fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish.”

— William Blake

“Painting can be like poetry but as somebody who creates both I feel the necessity for both so they cant be that similar. Sometimes I think it's as basic as not wanting to get dirty.”

— Danny Fox

“But how has it happened that millions of fables, tales, legends, have been blended with both Jewish and Christian revelation that have made them the most bloody religion that ever existed? How has it happened that all the fine arts, architecture, painting, sculpture, statuary, music, poetry, and oratory, have been prostituted, from the creation of the world, to the sordid and detestable purposes of superstition and fraud?
[Letter to judge F.A. Van der Kamp, December 27, 1816.]”

— John Adams

“Dance design is not simply one element; it is that without which ballet cannot exist. As aria is to opera, words to poetry, color to painting, so sequence in steps - their syntax, idiom, vocabulary - are the stuff of stage dancing.”

— Lincoln Kirstein

“Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“Painting, like poetry, selects in the universe whatever she deems most appropriate to her ends. She assembles in a single fantastic personage, circumstances and features which nature distributes among many individuals. From this combination, ingeniously composed, results that happy imitation by virtue of which the artist earns the title of inventor and not of servile copyist.”

— Francisco Goya

“Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love; it's an exchange of blood, a total embrace - without caution, without any thought of protecting yourself.”

— Joan Miro

“I make no distinction between poetry and painting.”

— Joan Miro

“Painting or poetry is made as one makes love - a total embrace, prudence thrown to the winds, nothing held back.”

— Joan Miro

“The fine arts are five in number, namely: painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and architecture, the principal branch of the latter being pastry.”

— Marie-Antoine Careme

“We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most "intellectual" piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why does music, why does poetry have to address us in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning?”

— Geoffrey Hill

“One of the surest evidences of an elevated taste is the power of enjoying works of impassioned terrorism, in poetry, and painting. The man who can look at impassioned subjects of terror with a feeling of exultation may be certain he has an elevated taste.”

— Benjamin Haydon

“The artist does not exist except as a personification, a figure of speech that represents the sum total of art itself. It is painting that is the genius of the painter, poetry of the poet, and a person is a creative artist to the extent that he participates in that genius.”

— Harold Rosenberg

“Poetry ... is the music and painting of the mind.”

— Sonia Orwell

“Since I have known God in a saving manner, painting, poetry, and music have had charms unknown to me before. I have received what I suppose is a taste for them, or religion has refined my mind and made it susceptible of impressions from the sublime and beautiful. O, how religion secures the heightened enjoyment of those pleasures which keep so many from God, by their becoming a source of pride!”

— Henry Martyn

“Poetry and painting have arrived to their perfection in our own country; music is yet but in its nonage [immaturity], a forward Child, which gives hope of what it may be hereafter in England, when the masters of it shall find more Encouragement.”

— Henry Purcell

“Poetry and painting are rooted in the same law,
The work of heaven and of the first cause.”

— Su Shi

“There is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor music, nor poetry. The only truth is creation.”

— Umberto Boccioni

“My father's death when I was eighteen and his struggles as a Jewish immigrant provided me with the raw material, but for a long time I went from painting to fiction and then finally to poetry before I could find the right way of telling this story.”

— Philip Schultz

“Poetry and painting continue to be companions: they cast their shadow and light, their silences and tones, at the edges of each other.”

— Pierre Coupey

“In the sphere of natural investigation, as in poetry and painting, the delineation of that which appeals most strongly to the imagination, derives its collective interest from the vivid truthfulness with which the individual features are portrayed.”

— David Hume

“Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the "Faery Queen."”

— James Russell Lowell

“A farce is that in poetry which grotesque (caricature) is in painting. The persons and actions of a farce are all unnatural, and the manners false, that is, inconsistent with the characters of mankind; and grotesque painting is the just resemblance of this.”

— John Dryden

“Poetry is to a painting what life is to man.”

— Georges Braque

“The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world ofits own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.”

— Walter Pater

“Painting was called silent poetry and poetry speaking painting.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Herein is the explanation of the analogies, which exist in all the arts. They are the re-appearance of one mind, working in many materials to many temporary ends. Raphael paints wisdom, Handel sings it, Phidias carves it, Shakspeare writes it, Wren builds it, Columbus sails it, Luther preaches it, Washington arms it, Watt mechanizes it. Painting was called "silent poetry," and poetry "speaking painting." The laws of each art are convertible into the laws of every other.”

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Laying out grounds ... may be considered as a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting ... it is to assist Nature in moving the affections ... the affections of those who have the deepest perception of the beauty of Nature ...”

— William Wordsworth