art Quotes

When writing the plot and choosing the right words, the poet should imagine the scene as clearly as possible. By seeing everything vividly, as if watching it happen, they will find what fits and are less likely to miss inconsistencies.

Talent is culture with insolence.

That which is impossible and probable is better than that which is possible and improbable.

Emotions of any kind are produced by melody and rhythm; therefore by music a man becomes accustomed to feeling the right emotions; music has thus the power to form character, and the various kinds of music based on various modes... ...

Metaphor is halfway between the unintelligible and the commonplace.

The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents the true reality, not external aspects.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

If you string together a set of speeches expressive of character, and well finished in point and diction and thought, you will not produce the essential tragic effect nearly so well as with a play which, however deficient in these... ...

For even they who compose treatises of medicine or natural philosophy in verse are denominated Poets: yet Homer and Empedocles have nothing in common except their metre; the former, therefore, justly merits the name of the Poet; while the other... ...