I believe that history has shape order and meaning that exceptional men as much as economic forces produce change and that passe abstractions like beauty nobility and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

Beauty is that which is simultaneously attractive and sublime.

Beauty attracts us men but if like an armed magnet it is pointed beside with gold and silver it attracts with tenfold power.

Abstraction brings the world into more complex variable relations it can extract beauty alternative topographies ugliness and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.

Vampires have always held a very seductive kind of lore and have always been some variety of attractive whether it's attractiveness that's born of just the physical attributes that they have - this kind of ethereal beauty or translucent pallor - or whether it is more to do with the way they carry themselves.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past but beauty is the promise of the future.

Praise or blame has but a momentary effect on the man whose love of beauty in the abstract makes him a severe critic on his own works.

The most common error made in matters of appearance is the belief that one should disdain the superficial and let the true beauty of one's soul shine through. If there are places on your body where this is a possibility you are not attractive - you are leaking.

My dad had this philosophy that if you tell children they're beautiful and wonderful then they believe it and they will be. So I never thought I was unattractive. But I was never one of the girls at school who had lots of boyfriends.

Zest is the secret of all beauty. There is no beauty that is attractive without zest.

In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude which our eye perceives which art reproduces and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.

Chaotic people often have chaotic lives and I think they create that. But if you try and have an inner peace and a positive attitude I think you attract that.

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.

To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then by simply changing the key we keep up the attraction and vary the song.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly decisively for good.

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art in the mid-eighties I almost always dismissed it as mannered Romantic formulaic conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties and then tailing off.

The forties seventies and the nineties when money was scarce were great periods when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.

We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.

The more horrifying this world becomes the more art becomes abstract.

Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten and the more a picture has to give the greater it is.

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.