Quotes From Various Sources 

Quotes About Literature and Art   

God sets ideals; heroes enact them; poets celebrate both ideals and heroes for the benefit of mankind.  Truth comes from God. It is expressed by a few heroic persons. And the artist-historian captures the image and preserves it for posterity.   --Richard Kirby

No good is ever done to society by the pictorial representation of its diseases.  --John Ruskin

Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.  --Dean William Inge

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.  --John Ruskin

He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas.  --John Ruskin

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere. --G. K. Chesterton

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.  --GKC

The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.  --GKC

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. --John Ruskin

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.  --John Ruskin

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.  --John Ruskin (and this was before the advent of modern 'art'!)

Fiction is the truth inside the lie. --Stephen King

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.  --Thomas Moore

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.  --C. S. Lewis (hereafter CSL)

Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result. --CSL

Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed  --CSL

In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, [Lucifer] could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige. --CSL

...art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.  --CSL

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.  --CSL

Nothing can be beautiful which is not true. --John Ruskin

There is not one blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice. --John Calvin

People are eternally divided into two classes, the believer, builder, and praiser, and the unbeliever, destroyer and critic. --John Ruskin

We must come to realize that great talent is not equivalent to greatness in the larger sense. A great artist may not be (and often is not) a good person. Very often nothing about him or her is worthy of emulation, except the talent.  Artists (like athletes and other celebrities) have talents we admire; but that does not make them admirable people.  --Richard Kirby

When art has no worthy aim or is governed by no morality, then what is left is either the celebration of meaninglessness, the perfecting of technique, or the quest for greater (and often more grotesque) novelty.  --Richard Kirby (hereafter RK)

Art and literature are good when they have a good moral effect, present models worthy of imitation and truths worth contemplating, and offer a vision of hope.  --RK

If an artist insists that his work is 'art for art's sake,' that he writes or paints only for himself, then let him be. Let him work at Wal-Mart and produce his egocentric, amoral artistry in his basement in the evening.  But don't encourage him.  And for goodness sake don't make us taxpayers support him. There is nothing sacred about art unless it serves a holy purpose.  Ars gratia artis, art for art's sake, is a spurious, solipsistic, and antisocial principle.  --RK

This kind of artist feels contempt for most of humanity and would consider himself a whore if his work was loved by common folk like us. You may not remember this, but Norman Rockwell, whose pictures delighted and challenged a generation of Americans--young and old, rich and poor--was largely ignored and despised by the high-fallutin' art world.  --RK

Nothing seems more obvious to me than that art ought to be moral, and (when it is not) it ought to be denounced by all right-thinking people. Immoral art ought to be treated like any other run-of-the-mill disturber of the peace--ignored as long as possible, then excoriated when it can't be ignored. When any influence becomes destructive to the community, whether it parades as art or literature or not, the community has the right to suppress it. The rights of the community are greater than the rights of the individual.  All grown-up people know that.  --RK

Literary criticism is something of a game, not to be taken as seriously as (say) politics or philosophy. But the modern critics seem to have forgotten the point of the game, which is to increase the enjoyment of good books.  --RK

So much of modern art and literature, instead of contributing to the health of the our society, celebrates our sicknesses and mocks our cures.  --RK

If an artist can create in us a humane sympathy for the freakish, the deformed, the handicapped, he has enlarged our humanity; he is a boon to our society. But if he celebrates the deformities of life as though they were life itself, his art is false. He is holding up a distorted, not a sympathetic, mirror up to nature.  --RK

Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers "Please will you do the job for me." --C. S. Lewis

Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. --CSL

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. --CSL

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.  --CSL

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that is very good but that most people can't eat it. --Leo Tolstoy

The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little - or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives. --Anthony Trollope

Satire is a useful literary posture, but as a life posture it is very bleak and sterile.  --Richard Kirby

Adapt your style, if you wish, to admit the color of slang or freshness of neologism, but hang tough on clarity, precision, structure, grace. --William Safire

Fashion is something barbarous, for it produces innovation without reason and imitation without benefit. --George Santayana

Teach your children poetry; it opens the mind, lends grace to wisdom and makes the heroic virtues hereditary. --Sir Walter Scott

The one and only substitute for experience which we have not ourselves had is art, literature. --Alexander Solzhenitsyn

The object of oratory alone is not truth, but persuasion. --Thomas Babington Macaulay

Poetry proceeds from the totality of man, sense, imagination, intellect, love, desire, instinct, blood and spirit together. --Jacques Maritain

Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. --Don Marquis

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.  --Marshall McLuhan

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.  --H L Mencken (Could also be located in Stupid Quotes)

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. --Samuel Johnson (either a joke or a Stupid Quote)

In reality, the world have paid too great a compliment to critics, and have imagined them men of much greater profundity than they really are.  --Henry Fielding

Censure and criticism never hurt anybody. If false, they can't hurt you unless you are wanting in manly character; and if true, they show a man his weak points; and forewarn him against failure and trouble.  --W. E. Gladstone

For works of the mind really great there is no old age, no decrepitude. It is inconceivable that a time should come when Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, should not ring in the ears of civilized man. --W. E. Gladstone

In a very real sense, people who have read good literature have lived more than people who cannot or will not read....It is not true that we have only one life to live; if we can read,  we can live as many more lives and as many kinds of lives as we wish.  --S.I. Hayakawa

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves. --Don Marquis

Publishing a volume of verse is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo. --Don Marquis