Austin O'Malley Art Quotations

The only original part in a work of art is the infusion of the artist's own character, if he has one.

Reason clears and plants the wilderness of the imagination to harvest the wheat of art.

If you keep your eyes so fixed on heaven that you never look at the earth, you will stumble into hell.

Man and the earth move in orbits: what they did before, they will do again.

That art is best which suggests most.

The only thing on earth that can determine itself is a human soul.

The reason we constantly discover new truth in Shakespeare is that his complete understanding of the particular includes the universal.

Truth as philosophy is a gas; as art, it is visible steam.

Art is one of man's few serious activities.

Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.

Sorrow may be a good thing for a woman's heart, but it is a poor cosmetic for her face.

Some that will hold a creed unto martyrdom will not hold the truth against a sneering laugh

The swing of art is circular, from form to formalism, from formalism to formlessness, from formlessness to form again.

The perfection of art is to conceal the sources.

Art is awkward until technique has become an unconscious habit.

Art knows, life applies knowledge; art feels, life acts.