"What ever beauty may be, it has for its basis order and for its essence unity." - Father Andre
"The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper." - Aristotle
"Each day I go to my studio full of joy; in the evening when obliged to stop because of darkness I can scarcely wait for the morning to come...My work is not only a pleasure, it has become a necessity. No matter how many other things I have in my life, if I cannot give myself to my dear painting I am miserable." - William Bouguereau
"One has to seek Beauty and Truth, Sir! As I always say to my pupils, you have to work to the finish. There's only one kind of painting. It is the painting that presents the eye with perfection, the kind of beautiful and impeccable enamel you find in Veronese and Titian." - William Bouguereau
"[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered." - Al Capp
"Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere." - G.K. Chesterton
"Function is always more important than beauty but they're not necessarily mutually exclusive, and the job of the industrial designer is to find the overlap." - Steven Den Beste
"The concept of 'art' has been defined to be so broad these days, that it's actually hard to tell whether you're looking at a profound statement of 21st century urban angst that also satirizes western consumerism and the SUV, or whether it's actually just a piece of flattened horseshit on the road." - Dilacerator
"My whole life is dealing with architecture and words. And at the end of the day, there’s something that I can’t entirely say when it comes to what Fallingwater feels like. I remember the first time I went to Fallingwater, taking a long walk down, looking at it from across the waterfall and you just wanted to sing. Just looked at it and you wanted to start singing some song or doing something. There was nothing really to say. It was so extraordinary." - Paul Goldberger, Architecture Critic
"[I]t’s somehow flattering to know you live in a place where someone, right now, is setting up an art installation that forces us to rethink the way we think about something. Anything. Except the historical failure of art installations to make anyone rethink about anything, ever." - James Lileks
"The vast con-game that most of modern art has become relies on a definition of "art" that equates it with pure expressiveness. The modern "artist" can say of some randomly ugly artifact "this is my artistic statement, and if you don't get it you are simply proving your own lack of sensitivity and taste." - Eric S. Raymond
"I think whoever came up with the plot [of Napoleon Dynamite] should be shot so they don't contaminate the world with any more of their garbage" - Miriam Reichenberg
"Quick, how can you tell that the concept of 'art' is dead in today's society? Anyone? How about when when a crowd in front of an art gallery mistakes a suicide for a 'performance'. That might be a clue. No doubt this same crowd probably watched with awe in their eyes at the 'political statement' being made by some random bum pissing in an alley. One on-looker could probably be overheard saying, 'I think I saw him throw a crucifix into that trash can before he started urinating into it - what a powerful indictment of religion.'" - Bret Schlyer
"Imagination without skill gives us contemporary art." - Tom Stoppard, Artist Descending a Staircase
"I think that Ms [Marilyn] Monroe as architecture is extremely good architecture" - Frank Lloyd Wright
"If you foolishly ignore beauty, you'll soon find yourself without it. Your life will be improverished. But if you wisely invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life." - Frank Lloyd Wright, New York Times, Oct. 4, 1953
"Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall." - Frank Lloyd Wright