Wise Words

 

Thoughts on Art from notable people born January 24:

from Prussian King Frederick the Great (1712-1786):

Books make up no small part of human happiness.

--

from English dramatist William Congreve (The Old Bachelour, The Double-Dealer, Love for Love, The Mourning Bride, The Way of the World) (1670-1729):

Wit must be foiled by wit: cut a diamond with a diamond.

Words are the weak support of cold indifference; love has no language to be heard.

To find a young fellow that is neither a wit in his own eye, nor a fool in the eye of the world, is a very hard task.

It is the business of a comic poet to paint the vices and follies of human kind.

Turn pimp, flatterer, quack, lawyer, parson, be chaplain to an atheist, or stallion to an old woman, anything but a poet; for a poet is worse, more servile, timorous and fawning than any I have named.

--

from French polymath Pierre-Augustin Beaumarchais (Le Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro) (1732-1799):

To make a living, craftiness is better than learnedness.

Plays, gentlemen, are to their authors what children are to women: they cost more pain than they give pleasure.

A writer's inspiration is not just to create. He must eat three times a day.

--

from German writer, composer, and painter E. T. A. Hoffmann (Undine, Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier, Nachtstücke, Nussknacker und Mausekönig) (1776-1822):

Why should not a writer be permitted to make use of the levers of fear, terror and horror because some feeble soul here and there finds it more than it can bear? Shall there be no strong meat at table because there happen to be some guests there whose stomachs are weak, or who have spoiled their own digestions?

Is it not in the most absolute simplicity that real genius plies its pinions the most wonderfully?

None but a poet can understand a poet; none but a romantic spirit transported with poetry and consecrated in the Holy of Holies can comprehend what the ordained utters out of his inspiration.

Perhaps, too, you will then believe that nothing is more wonderful, nothing more fantastic than real life, and that all that a writer can do is to present it as "in a glass, darkly."

Should anyone be audacious enough to think of casting doubt on the sterling worth of this remarkable book, let him reflect that he is dealing with a tomcat possessed of intellect, understanding, and sharp claws.

--

from American Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence); also known for The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome (1862-1937):

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision.

Beware of monotony; it's the mother of all the deadly sins.

To be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?

--

from American Abstract Expressionist painter Robert Motherwell (Elegies to the Spanish Republic series, Open series) (1915-1991):

Art is an experience, not an object.

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.

What could be more interesting, or in the end, more ecstatic, than in those rare moments when you see another person look at something you've made, and realize that they got it exactly, that your heart jumped to their heart with nothing in between.

The problems of inventing a new language are staggering. But what else can one do if one needs to express one's feeling precisely?

Painting that does not radiate feeling is not worth looking at. The deepest-and rarest-of grown-up pleasures is true feeling.

Without ethical consciousness, a painter is only a decorator.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.

If one were to ask a painter what he felt about anything, his just response—though he seldom makes it—would be to paint it, and in painting, to find out.