Nature Vs Art Quotes

If the art of ship-building were in the wood, ships would exist by nature.

Nature can afford to be prodigal in everything, the artist must be frugal down to the last detail. Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn.

But sure there is need of other remedies than dreaming, a weak contention of art against nature.

All art is concerned with coming into being; for it is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature.

Of all man's works of art, a cathedral is greatest. A vast and majestic tree is greater than that.

The exercise of criticism always destroys for a time our sensibility to beauty by leading us to regard the work in relation to certain laws of construction. The eye turns from the charms of nature to fix itself upon the servile dexterity of art.

All good and genuine draftsmen draw according to the picture inscribed in their minds, and not according to nature.

That which exists in nature is a something purely individual and particular. Art, on the contrary, is essentially destined to manifest the general.

What is one to think of those fools who tell one that the artist is always subordinate to nature? Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

I don't know why you'd want to say your work comes from nature, because art is related to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I'm always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We're both saying something we want to be true.

In scorn of nature, art gave lifeless life.

Things perfected by nature are better than those finished by art.

We by art unteach what Nature taught.

The climax of absurdity to which art may be carried when led away from nature by fashion, may be best seen in the works of Boucher.

Corneille is to Shakespeare as a clipped hedge is to a forest.