Edward Abbey Art Quotations

Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness.

Great art is never perfect; perfect art is never great.

The artist in our time has two chief responsibilities: (1) art; and (2) sedition.

Henry James was our master of periphrasis -- the fine art of saying as little as possible in the greatest number of words.

Art, science, philosophy, religion -- each offers at best only a crude simplification of actual living experience.

There is a fine art to making enemies and it requires diligent cultivation. It's not as easy as it looks.

In art as in life, form and subject, body and soul, are one.

In the modern world, all literary art is necessarily political -- especially that which pretends not to be.

In both metaphysics and art, honesty is the best policy. Keep it clean.

Life imitates art -- but badly.

Music is a savage art, a measured madness.

Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs-anything-but keep the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places.

All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.

How did Haydn and Mozart produce such vast quantities of formally perfect art? They worked from a perfect formula. In music, Beethoven was the Great Emancipator.

Those art lovers who pride themselves mostly on *taste* usually possess no other talent.

Great art is indefinable but that's all right; it exists anyway.