A Quote by Henry Abbey

The noblest works of human art and pride show that their makers were not satisfied.

Henry Abbey

Quote Topics

Art Human Makers Noblest Pride Satisfied Show Were Works

Quote Author

Henry Abbey
American - Poet
July 11, 1842 - June 7, 1911

Human beings seem to be a poor invention. If they are the noblest works of God where is the ignoblest?

Mark Twain

If you really want to show power in its larger aspects, you need to show the effects on the powerless, for good or ill - the human cost of public works. That's what I try to do, show not only how power works but its effect on people.

Robert Caro

The noblest art is the nude. This truth is recognized by all, and followed by painters, sculptors and poets. Only the dancer has forgotten it, who should remember it, as the instrument of [the dance] art is the human body itself.

Isadora Duncan

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Evelyn Waugh

As I developed as an artist and studied art history, I noticed that all the great works were dealing with the human condition. [Art] had humor in it. It had sex in it. But it also had sorrow running through it.

Eric Drooker

In the 1970s, a lot of critics didn't understand video. I got a lot of bad reviews. But film-makers didn't understand what we were doing, either. There were actual fistfights between film-makers and video-makers. I was witness to one.

Bill Viola

Unless the work of art has wholly exhausted its makers attention, it fails. This is why works of great significance are demanding and why they are infinitely rewarding.

Guy Davenport

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

Man Ray

The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

Susan Sontag

The noblest character is stained by the addition of pride.

Claudius Claudianus

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.

Edward Hirsch

I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.

Orhan Pamuk

At the beginning of the 20th century, the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music, which was then considered as the noblest art.

Brian Eno

Art is the one form of human energy in the whole world, which really works for union, and destroys the barriers between man and man. It is the continual, unconscious replacement, however fleeting, of oneself by another; the real cement of human life; the everlasting refreshment and renewal. For, what is grievous, dompting, grim, about our lives is that we are shut up within ourselves, with an itch to get outside ourselves. And to be stolen away from ourselves by Art is a momentary relaxation from that itching, a minute's profound, and as it were secret, enfranchisement.

John Galsworthy

Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.