W. Somerset Maugham Art Quotations

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

But I am not sure it would contain any short stories. For the short story is a minor art, and it must content itself with moving, exciting and amusing the reader. ...I do not think that there is any (short story) that will give the reader that thrill, that rapture, that fruitful energy which great art can produce.

Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

An art is only great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

Perhaps it would have been possible to see in him a new Prometheus...the hero who for the good of mankind exposes himself to the agonies of the damned...undaunted by failure, by an unceasing effort of courage holding despair at bay, doggedly persistent in the face of self-doubt, which is the artist's bitterest enemy...

Yet magic is no more than the art of employing consciously invisible means to produce visible effects. Will, love and imagination are magic powers that everyone possesses; and whoever knows how to develop them to their fullest extent is a magician. Magic has but one dogma, namely, that the seen is the measure of the unseen.

Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia.

Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach man humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action.

Art is triumphant when it can use convention as an instrument of its own purpose.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

The ballet. I saw in the fugitive beauty of a dancer's gesture a symbol of life. It was achieved at the cost of unending effort but, with all the forces of gravity against it, a fleeting poise in mid-air, a lovely attitude worthy to be made immortal in a bas-relief, it was lost as soon as it was gained and there remained no more than the memory of an exquisite emotion. So life, lived variously and largely, becomes a work of art only when brought to its beautiful conclusion and is reduced to nothingness in the moment when it arrives at perfection.

There is nothing so terrible as the pursuit of art by those who have no talent.

Art for art's sake makes no more sense than gin for gin's sake.

Art should be appreciated with passion and violence, not with a tepid, depreciating elegance that fears the censoriousness of a common room.

Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art. ~Waddington

In business sharp practice sometimes succeeds, but in art honesty is not only the best but the only policy.