Art Quote by Simon Schama

“Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.” quote by Simon Schama — Download Open image

“Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.”

Simon Schama

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Art Composure Great art Manners Order Painting Reality Rough

More by Simon Schama

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat…

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The difficulty with poetry is that it doesn't have the life that Shakespeare or Jane Austen have beyond the page. You can't make a…

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Taxation, the very thing that had triggered the British civil wars, would do so again, this time in America. The taxes may have been different, but the result would once again be disaster. What happened in America was really round two of those wars - the civil war of the British Empire, with the Hanoverians playing the part of the…

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Anyone can write an academic piece directed at other academics. To write something that delivers an argument and a gripping storyline to someone's granny…

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In its Greek origins, historia meant inquiry, and from Thucydides onwards, the past has been studied to understand its connections with the present.

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Jewish history turns out not to be an either/or story - as in, either pure Judaism detached from its surroundings or else assimilation -…

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Growing up in Britain as a rather loose Jew, the two things that didn't belong together were freedom and religious intensity. In America, they…

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In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not…

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From 1789, perhaps even before that, it had been the willingness of politicians to exploit either the threat or the fact of violence that…

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The default mode of modern writing about art is to despise any notion of singularity as so much overheated genius-fetishism.

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The synagogues of late antiquity and the early medieval period were built around imagery: imagery of remembering the Temple, but also of the celestial…

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At 11, 12, I thought I was clumsy, ugly, a mess, an unappealing person, but I did have the gift of the gab. I…

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Explore all 109 Simon Schama quotes

More Art quotes

True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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Before Noah, men having only water to drink, could not find the truth. Accordingly...they became abominably wicked, and they were justly exterminated by the water they loved to drink. This good man, Noah, having seen that all his contemporaries had perished by this unpleasant drink, took a dislike to it; and God, to relieve his dryness, created the vine and…

Benjamin Franklin

“Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word — every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus.”

Aeschylus

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I think most artists feel like they're outside society - no matter how many accolades they receive, or how much money is in your…

Aaron Rose

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The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

Erich Fromm

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That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you.

Ray Bradbury

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“So, really," continued Jacob as if this were perfectly normal to expound on art in these circumstances, "when you think about it, the artists who make people stop and think, who push the form, who make you uncomfortable, who are laughable, well, they're the ones who get remembered." Idly, Jacob dug a hole in the snow with his shovel and…

Justina Chen Headley