Art × Death

Art and Death

Browse 30 quotations catalogued under art with "death" in the text or topic label.

30 quotes

This collection contains 30 quotations filed under Art with "death" in the quote text or topic label. These keyword matches offer a starting point for exploring Art and Death; they do not by themselves establish a shared argument or a historical connection between the authors.

The authors represented include Baruch Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, Winston Churchill, Thomas Jefferson, and others. Read each quotation in its own context rather than assuming that these authors share a position.

One matching quotation reads: "What is remarkable is how popular this heretic remains nearly three and a half centuries after his death, and not just among scholars. Spinoza's contemporaries…" The full quotation appears below.

Another matching quotation reads: "Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection." Compare the wording and surrounding context to decide how each passage relates to your question.

Use the quotation links to explore individual entries and the author links to visit their profiles on QuoteLineage. For broader reading beyond these keyword matches, explore all Art quotes or the concept page for Death.

30 Quotes on Art and Death

"What is remarkable is how popular this heretic remains nearly three and a half centuries after his death, and not just among scholars. Spinoza's contemporaries, René Descartes and Gottfried Leibniz, made enormously important and influential contributions to the rise of modern philosophy and science, but you won’t find many committed Cartesians or Leibnizians around today. The Spinozists, however, walk among us. They are non-academic devotees who form Spinoza societies and study groups, who gather to read him in public libraries and in synagogues and Jewish community centres. Hundreds of people, of various political and religious persuasions, will turn out for a day of lectures on Spinoza, whether or not they have ever read him. There have been novels, poems, sculptures, paintings, even plays and operas devoted to Spinoza."

— Baruch Spinoza

"Every parting gives a foretaste of death; every coming together again a foretaste of the resurrection."

— Arthur Schopenhauer

"No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I could not foretell the course of events. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder."

— Winston Churchill

"If Gandhi tries to start a really hostile movement against us in this crisis, I am of the opinion that he should be arrested, and that both British and United States opinion would support such a step. If he likes to starve himself to death, we cannot help that."

— Winston Churchill

"If a due participation of office is a matter of right, how are vacancies to be obtained? Those by death are few; by resignation, none."

— Thomas Jefferson

"Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter's honor."

— Ernest Hemingway

"It was a great deed to conquer Carthage, but a greater deed to conquer death."

— Seneca the Younger

"If you want ease and success in this world, the death of a martyr, to be saved on the Day of Loss, a shade on the Day of the burning Qiyamat, and guidance on the Day of going astray, then take lessons from the Qur’an. Surely it is the word of the Merciful, a protection from the Satan, and one of the most weightiest of things for the scale of deeds ."

— Prophet Muhammad ﷺ

"Tommy locked his doors, armed his security system, replaced all the 9-volt batteries in his smoke detectors, made sure the gun in his dresser drawer was loaded, and went to bed where, before falling asleep, he recited a psalm from memory, with an emphasis on one line in particular: “yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me . . ."

"The Death of Nelson - painting by Benjamin West"

— Horatio Nelson

"I myself am no longer very much afflicted by the thought of my own death. The synthesis, Peter Wessel Zapffe, did not originate until 1899. It was spared from immediate participation in the horrors of the previous years, and it will not miss what awaits mankind at the end of its vertiginous madness."

— Peter Wessel Zapffe

"I have heard that tomorrow they are to execute the two prisoners, the accomplices of him who shot me. For my part, I most willingly pardon them. If they are thought deserving of a signal and severe penalty, I beg the magistrates not to put them to torture, but to give them a speedy death, if they have merited this. Good-night!"

— William the Silent

"Well, I looked at Picasso until I could smell his armpits and the cigarette smoke on his breast. Finally, in front of one picture – a bone figure on a beach – I got it. I saw that the figure was not his real subject. The plasticity wasn't either – although the plasticity was great. No. Picasso had uncovered a feverishness in himself and is painting it – a feverishness of death and beauty."

— William Baziotes

"…the author of The Satanic Verses book which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Qu'ran, and all involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death. I call on all zealous Muslims to execute them wherever they find them, so that no one will dare to insult the Islamic sanctions. Whoever is killed on this path will be regarded as a martyr, God willing."

— Ruhollah Khomeini

"I know that in early ages men did form degraded notions of the Almighty, painting Him like themselves, extreme only in all their passions : they thought He could he as lightly irritated as themselves, and that they could appease His anger by wretched offerings of innocent animals. From such a feeling as this to the sense of the value of a holy and spotless life and death — from the sacrifice of an animal to that of a saint — is a step forward out of superstition quite immeasurable. That between the earnest conviction of partial sight, and the strong metaphors of vehement minds, the sacrificial language should have been transferred onwards from one to the other, seems natural to me; perhaps inevitable. On the other hand, through all history we find the bitter fact that mankind can only be persuaded to accept the best gifts which Heaven sends them, in persecuting and destroying those who are charged to be their bearers."

— James Anthony Froude

"I had recklessly dared to do what I wouldn't dare to do today. The knight performs his morning prayer. When he is ready to pack up his chess set, he turns around, and there stands Death. 'Who are you?' asks the knight. 'I am Death.' Bengt Ekerot and I agreed that Death should have the features of a white clown. An amalgamation of a clown mask and a skull. It was a delicate and dangerous artistic move, which could have failed. Suddenly, an actor appears in whiteface, dressed all in black, and announces that he is Death. Everyone accepted the dramatic feat that he was Death, instead of saying, 'Come on now, don't try to put something over us! You can't fool us! We can see that you are just a talented actor who is painted white and clad in black! You're not Death at all!' But nobody protested. That made me feel triumphant and joyous."

— Ingmar Bergman

"Kandinsky is the inventor of abstract painting, the one who sought to overturn the traditional conceptions of aesthetic representation and to define a new area in this domain -- the era of modernity. In this regard, he appears as the 'Usher' or the 'Pioneer', to borrow the words of Tinguely. To understand Kandinsky's painting is to understand an art so new and so unusual that in its beginnings it only aroused scoffs, if not anger or spit. At the time of his death in 1944 in Paris, Kandinsky was still unknown to the French public, and misunderstood by the 'critics'. Today, one might wonder whether this situation has really changed."

— Michel Henry

"When the Pequots resisted the migration of settlers into the Connecticut Valley in 1637, a party of Puritans surrounded the Pequot village and set fire to it. About five hundred Indians were burned to death or shot while trying to escape... The woods were then combed for any Pequots who had managed to survive, and these were sold into slavery. Cotton Mather was grateful to the Lord that "on this day we have sent six hundred heathen souls to hell."

"That worries me. One death is attrition; two would look like incompetence—on someone’s part."

— Robert Charles Wilson

"Western classical music, to be sure, is not part of traditional Iranian culture, and yes it’s elitist. But the fact that the Tehran symphony Orchestra and the Roudaki Hall have survived the vagaries of these past three decades is yet another evidence that the forces of darkness, the cult of death, martyrdom and superstition has not conquered the spirit of our nation."

— Reza Pahlavi

"On the death of these great men Rembrandt, Ruysdael and Cum Landscape rapidly declined; and during almost the whole of the succeeding century, little was produced.. .From this degraded and fallen state it is delightful to say that landscape painting revived in our own country , in all its purity, simplicity, and grandeur, in the works of Wilson, Gainsborough, Cozens, and Girtin."

— John Constable

"I tell you, struggle is what is missing in the lives of most young people today. If they think I'm going to support them while they create great works of art, then they've missed the point of my work, of my life! In the process of becoming a writer or an artist one has to be willing to starve. Struggle is the most invaluable experience of all. Suffering seems to be the inevitable fate of the creative sensitive types. Poverty, disease, death, unrequited love affairs, and disappointments of every sort fan the flame of the artistic spirit. The greatest works of art were not created by spoiled brats. They were born for the most part out of a sense of despair, and if not despair then just plain hard work. Somewhere along the line the artist learns the art of transformation."

— Henry Miller

"The fact that I got to be the CEO of a publicly traded company in the marijuana space, that was something that was completely unexpected. But very quickly, marijuana products medicinally compete with legal prescription drugs that statistically kill 100,000 people a year. There's not been one documented death due to marijuana. Then on the recreational side, I've always maintained that legalizing marijuana will lead to less overall substance abuse because people will find it as such a safer alternative than everything else that's out there, starting with alcohol."

— Gary Johnson

"By adopting a strategy of "mitigation," or epidemic delay by "," these countries have de facto renounced any serious attempt to keep the virus under control from the start through the use of systematic screening and general confinement of the population, as was done in and Hubei province. According to the forecasts of the German and French governments, the strategy of collective immunity necessitates 50 to 80 percent contamination across the entire population. This amounts to accepting the deaths of hundreds of thousands — even millions — of people who are supposedly the "most fragile." All the while, the WHO’s recommendations were very clear: states must not abandon systematic screening and contact tracing of anyone who tests positive for the virus."

— Christian Laval

"I sat, just watching the moon creep up, and hearing the thin, dry rustle of the leaves along the holly hedge. And there came to me this thought: What is this Universe — that never had beginning and will never have an end — but a myriad striving to perfect pictures never the same, so blending and fading one into another, that all form one great perfected picture? And what are we — ripples on the tides of a birthless, deathless, equipoised Creative-Purpose — but little works of Art?"

— John Galsworthy

"ear these points in mind, the association of Death and Chance, the notion of both as chaotic in their action, and their embodiment in a great artistic ideal—the Dance of Death—which gave so much colouring to mediaeval thought and life. We find this sombre notion everywhere—on the church walls, on the bridges, in the engravings ands, but as well in the sermons, the poetry, and the very turn of folk-sentiment."

— Karl Pearson

"Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the death-line: to dismantle in order to build 'A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART'."

— Joseph Beuys

"The world of art was less fortunate. Many of the younger men barely lived through the first flush of youth. Destroying Death is the worst enemy to the arts."

— Wynford Dewhurst

": What would happen if you wore a dress? Well, some people would invite you to parties. And some people would attempt to beat you to death."

— Nicole Hollander

"It was difficult to believe these things had taken place such a very long time ago. The events seemed distant, as though he had only read about them and not experienced them at all. He knew that at this point his death was far closer, far more tangible. That was something he could almost touch. One could feel one’s mortal form progressing slowly to ruin, like that old abbey—the signs were undeniable. Things went wrong inside a man and did not come right again. That was the truth that hung over one’s head like a blade. Injuries and illnesses were no longer easily repaired. And as with some part of a painting that he could never get right, the great danger was to see nothing but what was wrong. The trap of age."

— Sean Russell

Key thinkers on this theme

Baruch Spinoza· Philosophy Arthur Schopenhauer· Philosophy Winston Churchill· Politics Thomas Jefferson· Politics Ernest Hemingway· Literature

Related ideas in Art

All Art quotes Explore the idea of Death