A Quote by Max Beerbohm

The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends.

Max Beerbohm

Quote Topics

Art Ends Free Loose Loose Ends Past Work

Quote Author

Max Beerbohm
English - Actor
August 24, 1872 - May 20, 1956

Then I felt too that I might take this opportunity to tie up a few loose ends, only of course loose ends can never be properly tied, one is always producing new ones. Time, like the sea, unties all knots. Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may otherwise pretend in order to console us.

Iris Murdoch

art is the most general condition of the Past in the present. ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past.

Susan Sontag

To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was.

Pablo Picasso

I think if your goal is for everything to be okay, that's a mistake. To achieve that goal, the only obstacle you'd have to face tomorrow is to eliminate all risk ... I've made the decision that I'm never trying to make everything okay. I'm trying for there to be more loose ends, not fewer loose ends.

Seth Godin

I find most American films annoy me because their third act tends to be tying up loose ends and returning to moral values and killing the monster. I think most of the scripts I read to tend to go in that direction and I find that very, very unsatisfying. I want the stories to have loose ends and to pose some questions - or even say things that aren't too comfortable.

David MacKenzie

If you see to it each day that your conduct is impeccable, the following day will be completely clear, and you will be free to carry out your plans, always vigilant that you leave no loose ends. In this way, each new day will find you free and well disposed.

Omraam Mikhael Aivanhov

Sometimes we forget that if we do not encourage new work now, we will lose all touch with the work of the past we claim to love. If art is not living in a continuous present, it is living in a museum, only those working now can complete the circuit between the past, present and future energies we call art.

Jeanette Winterson

My studio work is a central part of my life and I'd be at loose ends without it. When I'm not in my studio, I don't stop thinking about painting.

Stephen Beal

At what point, then, should one resist? When one's belt is taken away? When one is ordered to face into a corner? When one crosses the threshold of one's home? An arrest consists of a series of incidental irrelevancies, of a multitude of things that do not matter, and there seems no point in arguing about one of them individually...and yet all these incidental irrelevancies taken together implacably constitute the arrest.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Infancy is the realm conveyed to us in dreams which look backward to the past. Adolescence, more like a work of art, is a prospective symbol of personal synthesis and of the future of humankind. Like a work of art that sets us on the pathway to new discoveries, adolescence promotes new meanings by mobilizing energies that were initially invested in the past.

Louise J. Kaplan

I keep a couple of notebooks too into which I record ideas for story titles or characters or situations, and these notes help me quite a bit when I'm feeling at loose ends and not sure of what to work on next.

Christine Sneed

Any combining, mixing, adding, diluting, exploiting, vulgarizing, or popularizing of abstract art deprives art of its essence and depraves the artist's artistic consciousness. Art is free, but it is not a free-for-all.

Donald Judd

To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art does not live in the present, it must not be considered at all.

Pablo Picasso

Art is craft: all art is always and essentially a work of craft: but in the true work of art, before the craft and after it, is some essential durable core of being, which is what the craft works on, and shows, and sets free. The statue in the stone. How does the artist find that, see it, before it's visible? That is a real question.