Art and the saints are the greatest apologetics for our faith.

Art and works of art do not make an artist; sense and enthusiasm and instinct do.

Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that everybody's creative. They're not.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy: It is a very personal affair and is necessary to each individual.

Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes.

Art as a whole is a riddle. Another way of putting this is to say that art expresses something while at the same time hiding it.

Art as an aesthetic principle was supported by thousands of years of discernment and psychic rewards, but art as a commodity was held up by air. The loss of confidence that affected banks and financial instruments was not affecting cherubs, cupids and flattened popes. The objects hadn't changed: what was there before was there after. But a vacancy was created with the clamoring crowds deserted and retrenched.

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.

Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential.

Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Art awakens a sense of real by establishing an intimate relationship between our inner being and the universe at large, bringing us a consciousness of deep joy.

Art becomes so specialized as to be comprehensible only to artists, and they complain bitterly of public indifference to their work.

Competition arises. The wild battle for success becomes more and more material. Small groups who have fought their way to the top of the chaotic world of art and picture-making entrench themselves in the territory they have won. The public, left far behind, looks on bewildered, loses interest and turns away.

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.

Art begins with resistance, at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

Art belongs to all times and to all countries; its special benefit is precisely to be still living when everything else seems dying; that is why Providence shields it from too personal or too general passions, and grants it a patient and persevering organization, durable sensibility, and the contemplative sense in which lies invincible faith.

Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only.

Art breaks open a dimension inaccessible to other experience, a dimension in which human beings, nature, and things no longer stand under the law of the established reality principle...The encounter with the truth of art happens in the estranging language and images which make perceptible, visible, and audible that which is no longer, or not yet, perceived, said, and heard in everyday life.