William Morris Art Quotations

I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.

History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created.

So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.

If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it.

The heart desires, the hand refrains. The Godhead fires, the soul attains.

So I say, if you cannot learn to love real art; at least learn to hate sham art and reject it. It is not because the wretched thing is so ugly and silly and useless that I ask you to cast it from you; it is much more because these are but the outward symbols of the poison that lies within them; look through them and see all that has gone to their fashioning, and you will see how vain labour, and sorrow, and disgrace have been their companions from the first-and all this for trifles that no man really needs!

If i were asked to say what is at once the most important production of Art and the thing most to be longed for, I should answer, A beautiful House.

Architecture would lead us to all the arts, as it did with earlier mean: but if we despise it and take no note of how we are housed, the other arts will have a hard time of it indeed.

Slayer of the winter, art thou here again? O welcome, thou that bring'st the summer nigh! The bitter wind makes not the victory vain. Nor will we mock thee for thy faint blue sky.

I have said as much as that the aim of art was to destroy the curse of labour by making work the pleasurable satisfaction of our impulse towards energy, and giving to that energy hope of producing something worth its exercise.

Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.

Art made by the people for the people, as a joy to the maker and the user,

I love art, and I love history, but it is living art and living history that I love. It is in the interest of living art and living history that I oppose so-called restoration. What history can there be in a building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at the best be anything but a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigor of the earlier world?

The greatest foe to art is luxury, art cannot live in its atmosphere.

...If our houses, or clothes, our household furniture and utensils are not works of art, they are either wretched makeshifts, or, what is worse, degrading shams of better things.