Robert Wilson Lynd Quotes

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

My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.

Simplicity is the essence of the great, the true, the beautiful in art.

I have drawn people's attention to the fact that art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance.

The eternal task of song can never be finished in a single lifetime. That is the beauty and fascination of the art. Once you begin to phrase finely, you will feel more joy in the beautiful finish of a beautiful phrase than that caused by the loudest applause of an immense audience. The latter excites for a moment; the former endures forever.

Delightful, tragic, gloriously elegiac and riddled with puns-Close to Hugh is just like life, only so much more beautiful for being art.

As for the author, he is profoundly unaware of what the classical or romantic genre might consist of.... In literature, as in allthings, there is only the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false.

Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

I am sure that there is no place in the world where your message would not be enhanced by your making the place (whether tiny or large, a hut or a palace) orderly, artistic and beautiful with some form of creativity, some form of ‘art’ (p. 213).

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in surfaces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radiation from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attributes.

Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.

Anything that is beautiful is beautiful just as it is. Praise forms no part of its beauty, since praise makes things neither better nor worse. This applies even more to what it commonly called beautiful: natural objects, for example, or works of art. True beauty has no need of anything beyond itself.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become beautiful with time.

Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.

A beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful form; it gives a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of fine arts.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all!

I'm not interested in perfection. The universe is perfect, and there are some works of art that we see as perfect, but human beings aren't perfect.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

Every good piece of art... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.

The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.

She was the most beautiful thing you ever saw. She was radiant. And she was wearing this necklace... When you see the necklace in the painting, it all makes sense. He loved her. Even if she lived to one hundred and five without ever getting an answer.

And on this earth of ours there are but few souls that can withstand the dominion of the soul that has suffered itself to become beautiful.

Beauty addresses itself chiefly to sight, but there is a beauty for the hearing too, as in certain combinations so words and in all kinds of music; for melodies and cadences are beautiful; and minds that lift themselves above the realm of sense to a higher order are aware of beauty in the conduct of life, in actions, in character, in the pursuits of the intellect; and there is the beauty of the virtues.

What care I if it be "wild and improbable" and "lacking in literary art"? I refuse to be any longer hampered by such canons of criticism. The one essential thing I demand of a book is that it should interest me. If it does, I forgive it every other fault.

At moments of great enthusiasm it seems to me that no one in the world has ever made something this beautiful and important.