These Baroque quotes will inspire you. The Baroque is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1740s.

Best Baroque Quotes

1. “I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. The baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources.” ~ Jorge Luis Borges
2. “Borne out of this, starting around the 17th Century was the Baroque era. It is my view that it is one of the architectural peak periods in western civilisation.” ~ Harry Seidler
3. “A contemporary artist can use the findings of all epochs and all styles, from the most primitive literary expressions up to the most refined products of the baroque.” ~ Juan Goytisolo
4. “I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He’s one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera.” ~ Cecilia Bartoli

5. “Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

6. “Has it struck you that the music which is regarded as the most sublime in western civilization, which is the music of Bach, is called baroque?” ~ Pierre Schaeffer
7. “It is the Late city that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its silhouette, denies all Nature. It wants to be something different from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis, the city-as-world, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets about annihilating the country picture.” ~ Oswald Spengler
8. “Baroque sculpture and interior design has a quality of creating an environment that seems organic because it’s full of curves and details, like a forest.” ~ Camille Henrot

9. “Classical, Romantic, and Baroque music, that’s what I really like.” ~ Joan Armatrading

10. “Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don’t redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.” ~ Susan Sontag
11. “I think in Baroque music, especially in the case of Bach, what really transformed Bach’s musical language, what changed it for him was hearing Vivaldi, hearing the sort of manipulation of small cells of information and patterns in order to generate sort of huge blocks of harmony.” ~ Mahan Esfahani
12. “Find what gave you emotion; what the action was that gave you excitement. Then write it down making it clear so that the reader can see it too. Prose is architecture, not interior decoration, and the Baroque is over.” ~ Ernest Hemingway

13. “The white race is the cancer of human history.” ~ Susan Sontag

14. “I was attracted by the curve — the liberated, sensual curve suggested by the possibilities of new technology yet so often recalled in venerable old baroque churches.” ~ Oscar Niemeyer
15. “Do whatever you please, follow your own star; be original if you want to be and don’t if you don’t want to be. Just be natural and gay and light-hearted and pretty and simple and overflowing and general and baroque and bare and austere and stylised and wild and daring and conservative, and learn and learn and learn. Open your mind to every form of beauty.” ~ Constance Spry
16. “But then life is never neat, it is made up of doors and trapdoors. You move down baroque corridors, and even when you think you know which door to open, you still need to have the courage to choose.” ~ J. M. Ledgard

17. “For my own singing, I used to be attracted by the baroque, the flashier the better, but now I prefer a simpler, purer style.” ~ Renee Fleming

18. “I listen to music when I write. I need the musical background. Classical music. I’m behind the times. I’m still with Baroque music, Gregorian chant, the requiems, and with the quartets of Beethoven and Brahms. That is what I need for the climate, for the surroundings, for the landscape: the music.” ~ Elie Wiesel
19. “When I think about the reference to baroque, I’m most interested in how art was integrated into domestic life. That’s why I like fresco, because fresco is part of the wall. It’s art, but it’s decoration at the same time.” ~ Camille Henrot
20. “Normally, things are viewed in these little segmented boxes. There’s classical, and then there’s jazz; romantic, and then there’s baroque. I find that very dissatisfying. I was trying to find the thread that connects one type of music – one type of musician – to another, and to follow that thread in some kind of natural, evolutionary way.” ~ Jerry Lee Lewis

21. “My thesis statement would be—Bach didn’t write Baroque music. He wrote great music.” ~ Chris Thile

22. “The essential factor in the transition of the baroque to photography is not the perfecting of a physical process… rather does it lie in a psychological fact, to wit, in completely satisfying our appetite for illusion by a mechanical reproduction in the making of which man plays not part. The solution is not to be found in the result achieved, but in the way of achieving it.” ~ Andre Bazin
23. “Eiffel saw his Tower in the form of a serious object, rational, useful; men return it to him in the form of a great baroque dream which quite naturally touches on the borders of the irrational … architecture is always dream and function, expression of a utopia and instrument of a convenience.” ~ Roland Barthes
24. “One person looks around and sees a universe created by a god who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between one another, for neither set of beliefs make us kinder or wiser.” ~ Mark Haddon

25. “My look is either very baroque or very Zen – everything in between makes me itch.” ~ Iris Apfel

26. “Post-Modern space is historically specific, rooted in conventions, unlimited or ambiguous in zoning and irrational or transformational in its relation of parts to whole……. …skew or distorted spaces, created by sharp angles which exaggerate perspective…. …always keep a mental coordinate system no matter how free- form and baroque they become. The reference plane is always an implied frontality, and the route through the building or the curvilinear elements then relate to this conceptual cage” ~ Charles Jencks
27. “I was trying to run something to ground that had come to my attention when I was working on the Baroque Cycle. That series, of course, was about the conflict between Newton and Leibniz. Leibniz developed a system of metaphysics called monadology, which looked pretty weird at the time and was promptly buried by Newtonian-style physics.” ~ Neal Stephenson
28. “It’s art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn’t about progress, and wants to – as Walt Whitman put it – ‘contain multitudes.'” ~ Jerry Saltz

29. “The greatest architectural illusion is not Baroque fancy or Victorian flamboyant, but minimalism.” ~ Kevin McCloud

30. “Cookbooks have all become baroque and very predictable. I’m looking for something different. A lot of chefs’ cookbooks are food as it’s done in the restaurants, but they are dumbed down, and I hate it when they dumb them down.” ~ Mario Batali
31. “Several factors besides skill are more significant in professional writers than in most amateurs. One is love of the surface level of language: the sound of it; the taste of it on the tongue; what it can be made to do in virtuosic passages that exist only for their own sake, like cadenzas in baroque concerti. Writers in love with their tools are not unlike surgeons obsessed with their scalpels, or Arctic sled racers who sleep among their dogs even when they don’t have to.” ~ Alice Weaver Flaherty
32. “I think I’m fascinated with history and – just in general. And I’m always interested in how did – how did this come to be? Why is this the way it is? And even singing classical voice, I quickly became more and more interested with early music, baroque voice. And that became an obsession to me – just figuring out how – who are the ancestors of whatever it is.” ~ Cecile McLorin Salvant

33. “Jazz, for me, is a closed circuit, like the term baroque in the world of classical music.” ~ Jan Garbarek

34. “While there are so many beautiful Baroque churches and it’s a beautiful artistic tradition, it almost gets hideous and grotesque if you push it further. You can take something beautiful and overdo it.” ~ Win Butler
35. “I had the right amount of detachment to go back and really appreciate what I had grown up with. There’s a particular style that is very Peru that you don’t see anywhere else; it’s got so many different imprints. When you mix Incan minimalism with the heavy, ornate Spanish Baroque, it is very interesting.” ~ Mario Testino
36. “My visual landscape as a child was the inside of a lot of these old churches. And the Baroque drama of the things was what I was first engaging with artwise. I’m much more attracted to the aesthetic of religious iconography than the actual religious side. The passion and the blood and the violence and the gaudy side of it I find really fascinating.” ~ Florence Welch
37. “Music always stimulates my imagination. When I’m writing I usually have some Baroque music on low in the background chamber music by Bach, Telemann, and the like.” ~ Haruki Murakami

38. “Kitsch is the contemporary form of the Gothic, Rococo, Baroque.” ~ Frank Wedekind

39. “I’m not able to completely escape naturalism. It’s very difficult to escape from naturalism without being too dry. That’s what I try to do in my cinema – escape naturalism and do films that are, at the same time, realistic but have a lot of fantasy. It’s very difficult in cinema to get away from what life is about, from real life. The way the actors work has to be realistic – you can’t do Baroque acting – so it’s very complicated. And, we’re human beings, so we’re not perfect. I’m trying to do something different.” ~ Philippe Garrel
40. “It is interesting to note that the best periods of Italian Horror films came out of the Sixties, when Italy was enjoying a carnival period of phenomenal optimism, and the shadowy side surfaced with all of its attendant dark, beautiful, baroque, catholic symbolism.” ~ Barbara Steele
41. “I like Modernism. I grew up around these sort of eclectic, heavily carved, baroque, rococo, highly ornamented styles that were in my life from the time that I was a child until now in my business life. So I like clean, straight, minimalist lines.” ~ Paul Brown
42. “I’ll never be a minimalist. The fact that the prose is more tightly controlled doesn’t for a minute mean that it’s minimalist. I very much like arcane words and baroque sentence structure.” ~ China Mieville

43. “Some people go to Berlin to get more cutting edge; I went and started wearing lederhosen and going to visit baroque palaces.” ~ Rufus Wainwright

44. “I try to find a style that matches the book. In the Baroque Cycle, I got infected with the prose style of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, which is my favorite era. It’s recent enough that it is easy to read – easier than Elizabethan English – but it’s pre-Victorian and so doesn’t have the pomposity that is often a problem with 19th-century English prose. It is earthy and direct and frequently hilarious.” ~ Neal Stephenson
45. “Fall 2013 was inspired by the 1970s equestrian lifestyle. I wanted to incorporate the moody and romantic – intricate baroque detailing and classic menswear elements – with something tougher and edgier in a nod to London’s rock n’ roll underground.” ~ Rachel Zoe
46. “My mother’s family were full-on Irish Catholics – faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women’s rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old.” ~ Geraldine Brooks

47. “I’ve always been heavily influenced by classical music, mostly by baroque music.” ~ Yngwie Malmsteen

48. “So a lot of what you see in the Baroque Cycle is me wanting to be one of those guys. In the case of Anathem, I needed something that was more formal, less flashy, as if it had been translated from the classical language of another planet, but enlivened with slang terms that a teenage narrator would enjoy throwing around.” ~ Neal Stephenson
49. “To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity.” ~ Wade Davis
50. “I think, you know, for someone who does play, let’s say, old music or, you know, Baroque music or Renaissance music – and you know, and I do play a lot of that, obviously – engaging with new composers, engaging with young composers, is really exciting because it makes me look at people of the past in a very different way that they are also living, that there was a lot of subjectivity in the decisions that they were making.” ~ Mahan Esfahani
51. “I’m not a designer who is very interested in baroque or in fantasy or in the fantastic side of fashion. This exists and this is important, but I’m interested in the very real dimensions.” ~ Christophe Lemaire

52. “The challenge now is to renovate the baroque structure that the Kyoto Plan has become—or else scrap it and get ready to start all over.” ~ Christopher Flavin

53. “The Humbling is not vintage Roth, despite its compelling premise. The bizarre series of episodes — mostly sexual encounters with women — which make up this short novel don’t play to Roth’s strengths. (…) The Humbling disappoints because it avoids these universal implications, and veers off into a baroque world of the unique and fantastic, never quite deigning to make its world concrete or to give its characters the honor of an independent will.” ~ Philip Hensher
54. “Whenever the C++ language designers had two competing ideas as to how they should solve some problem, they said, “OK, we’ll do them both”. So the language is too baroque for my taste.” ~ Donald Knuth
55. “Margaret Kochamma’s tiny, ordered life relinquished itself to this truly baroque bedlam with the quiet gasp of a warm body entering a chilly sea.” ~ Arundhati Roy
56. “The merry-go-round was running, yes, but… It was running backward. The small calliope inside the carousel machinery rattle-snapped its nervous-stallion shivering drums, clashed its harvest-moon cymbals, toothed its castanets, and throatily choked and sobbed its reeds, whistles, and baroque flutes.” ~ Ray Bradbury

57. “I think I’ve learned more about Baroque music than any other genre.” ~ Joyce DiDonato

58. “In years to come cities will stretch out horizontally and will be non-urban (Los Angeles). After that, they will bury themselves in the ground and will no longer have names. Everything will become infrastructure bathed in artificial light and energy. The brilliant superstructure, the crazy verticality will have disappeared. New York is the final fling of this baroque verticality, this centrifugal excentricity before the horizontal dismantling arrives, and the subterranean implosion that will follow.” ~ Jean Baudrillard
59. “I deliberately disregarded the right angle and rationalist architecture designed with ruler and square to boldly enter the world of curves and straight lines offered by reinforced concrete… This deliberate protest arose from the environment in which I lived, with its white beaches, its huge mountains, its old baroque churches, and the beautiful suntanned women.” ~ Oscar Niemeyer
60. “But where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained, as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of useful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is [to be] avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination’s freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination.” ~ Immanuel Kant

61. “My wife and I battle over home decor. My style goes from Gothic to Baroque. Hers is minimalist.” ~ Joe Bastianich

62. “Architecture traditionally has been the slowest of art forms. It was not unusual for great cathedrals to take centuries to complete, with stylistic changes from Romanesque to Gothic or Renaissance to Baroque as common as the addition of chapels or spires. But because the function remained the same, the form could be flexible and its growth organic.” ~ Martin Filler
63. “A baroque art-rock bubblegum broadcast on a frequency understood only by female teenagers and bred field mice.” ~ Mark Coleman
64. “Rather than teasing the buyers, we may blame the society in which they lived for setting up a situation where the purchase of ornate cabinets felt psychologically necessary and rewarding, where respect was dependent on baroque displays. Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.” ~ Alain de Botton
65. “The mentally disturbed do not employ the Principle of Scientific Parsimony: the most simple theory to explain a given set of facts. They shoot for the baroque.” ~ Philip K. Dick

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