George Bernard Shaw Quotes About Art
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You will think less of the art, when you know the artist
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I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else.
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The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary
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All great art and literature is propaganda.
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The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer.
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The art of manipulating public opinion, which is a necessary art for the democratic politician, and, like other arts, is sometimespractised with greater virtuosity by knaves than by honest men (who are apt to disdain it), has a different technique in different countries. For instance, in England we excel in whitewashing: in America they excel in tarring and feathering. We strain our nerves and stretch our consciences to avoid a scandal: Americans do the same to make one.
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The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
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Consistency is the enemy of enterprise, just as symmetry is the enemy of art.
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If you can say a thing with one stroke, unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchande de plaisir; a decorative litt
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Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion.
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Fine art is the only teacher except torture.
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My religious convictions and scientific views cannot at present be more specifically defined than as those of a believer in creative revolution. I desire that no public monument or work of art or inscription or sermon or ritual service commemorating me shall suggest that I accepted the tenets peculiar to any established church or denomination nor take the form of a cross or any other instrument of torture or symbol of blood sacrifice.
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Go on writing plays, my boy, One of these days one of these London producers will go into his office and say to his secretary, "Is there a play from Shaw this morning?" and when she says, "No," he will say, "Well, then we'll have to start on the rubbish." And that's your chance, my boy.
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A true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art.
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People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic.
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A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
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Fine art is the subtlest, the most seductive, the most effective instrument of moral propaganda in the world, excepting only the example of personal conduct; and I waive even this exception in favor of the art of the stage, because it works by exhibiting examples of personal conduct made intelligible and moving to crowds of unobservant unreflecting people to whom real life means nothing.
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If you leave your art, the world will beat you back to it. The world has not an ambition worth sharing, or a prize worth handling.
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You have no right to say that I am not sincere. I have found a happiness in art that real life has never given me. I am intensely in earnest about art. There is is a magic and mystery in art that you know nothing of.
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I hate performers who debase great works of art; I long for their annihilation.
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God made the world as an artist and that is why the world must learn from its artists.
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You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
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In the arts of peace Man is a bungler.
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Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.
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All industries are brought under the control of such people [film producers] by Capitalism. If the capitalists let themselves be seduced from their pursuit of profits to the enchantments of art, they would be bankrupt before they knew where they were. You cannot combine the pursuit of money with the pursuit of art.
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A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
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A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned.
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It is ridiculous to say that art has nothing to do with morality. What is true is that the artist's business is not that of the policeman.
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The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.
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I believe in Michelangelo, Velasquez, and Rembrandt; in the might of design, the mystery of color, the redemption of all things by Beauty everlasting, and the message of Art that has made these hands blessed. Amen. Amen.
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