Quotes about Art

I find working with glass meditative, almost therapeutic. I can leave the world behind, and focus... The simplicity of form, the drama of rich, intense colour, the joy of challenge, and the challenge of endurance... The piece, when it is over, is not what is made, but how it is made.

Andrew Kuntz

Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. [1804]

Benjamin Constant

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

Carl Jung

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Daniel Barenboim

I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

Denise Levertov

Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas.

Elizabeth Murray

Good art can not be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Ezra Pound

Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.

Goethe

Women, poets, and especially artists, like cats; delicate natures only can realize their sensitive nervous systems.

Helen M. Winslow

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

Jean de La Bruyère

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

John Adams

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

Joseph Campbell

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite -- getting something down.

Julia Cameron

Art is the only thing you cannot punch a button for. You must do it the old-fashioned way. Stay up and really burn the midnight oil. There are no compromises.

Leonytne Price

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.

Magdalena Abakanowicz

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Oscar Levant

My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

Pablo Picasso

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Pablo Picasso

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

Ralph Sockman

There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Richard Avedon

Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.

Rita Mae Brown

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Rollo May

Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.

Sir Walter Scott

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

Theodore Adorno

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.

Thomas Moore

Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irespective of size or wealth.

Vita Sackville-West

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.

William S. Burroughs

Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.

William Wordsworth

I find working with glass meditative, almost therapeutic. I can leave the world behind, and focus... The simplicity of form, the drama of rich, intense colour, the joy of challenge, and the challenge of endurance... The piece, when it is over, is not what is made, but how it is made.

Andrew Kuntz

Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. [1804]

Benjamin Constant

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

Carl Jung

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Daniel Barenboim

I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

Denise Levertov

Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas.

Elizabeth Murray

Good art can not be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Ezra Pound

Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.

Goethe

Women, poets, and especially artists, like cats; delicate natures only can realize their sensitive nervous systems.

Helen M. Winslow

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

Jean de La Bruyère

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

John Adams

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

Joseph Campbell

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite -- getting something down.

Julia Cameron

Art is the only thing you cannot punch a button for. You must do it the old-fashioned way. Stay up and really burn the midnight oil. There are no compromises.

Leonytne Price

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.

Magdalena Abakanowicz

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Oscar Levant

My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

Pablo Picasso

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Pablo Picasso

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

Ralph Sockman

There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Richard Avedon

Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.

Rita Mae Brown

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Rollo May

Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.

Sir Walter Scott

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

Theodore Adorno

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.

Thomas Moore

Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irespective of size or wealth.

Vita Sackville-West

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.

William S. Burroughs

Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.

William Wordsworth

You don't take a photograph, you make it.

Ansel Adams

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

Ansel Adams

There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

Ansel Adams

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

Ansel Adams

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

Ansel Adams

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Scott Adams

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Theodor Adorno

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Theodor Adorno

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Theodor Adorno

My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process.

Tadao Ando

Things are beautiful if you love them.

Jean Anouilh

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Aristotle

Well begun is half done.

Aristotle

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

W.H. Auden

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

Francis Bacon

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

Francis Bacon

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

Honore de Balzac

Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

Ellen Barkin

People of art should never get married and have children, because it's a selfish experience.

Mikhail Baryshnikov

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Charles Baudelaire

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.

Cecil Beaton

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

Henry Ward Beecher

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

Ambrose Bierce

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

Theodore Bikel

Words are often seen hunting for an idea, but ideas are never seen hunting for words.

Josh Bilings

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

Josh Bilings

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

William Blake

A picture is worth a thousand words.

Napoleon Bonaparte

Imagination rules the world.

Napoleon Bonaparte

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

Henri Cartier-Bresson

I have a love-hate relationship with performing.

Sarah Brightman

You do have to be fairly selfish when you have a gift. You cannot afford to let too many outside things get in the way.

Sarah Brightman

The history of art is the history of revivals.

Samuel Butier

I paint with shapes.

Alexander Calder

My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six.

Alexander Calder

To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect.

Alexander Calder

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Italo Calvino

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

Albert Camus

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Albert Camus

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

Albert Camus

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Albert Camus

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

Al Capp

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

Dale Carnegie

Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

John le Carre

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.

Willa Cather

We live in a rainbow of chaos

Paul Cezanne

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Paul Cezanne

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

Paul Cezanne

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad

Marc Chagall

Great art picks up where nature ends.

Marc Chagall

I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more.

Marc Chagall

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Marc Chagall

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Winston Churchill

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

John Ciardi

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

Jean Cocteau

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.

Cyril Connolly

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles,and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.

Cyril Connolly

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one

Charles Horton Cooley

One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.

Charles Horton Cooley

Art depends on luck and talent.

Francis Ford Coppola

I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing.

Francis Ford Coppola

Every song is like a painting.

Dick Dale

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

Salvador Dali

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

Salvador Dali

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Salvador Dali

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do.

Edgar Degas

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.

Eugene Delacroix

Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint.

Robert Delaunay

Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

Howard Dietz

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

John Gregory Dunne

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

Albert Einstein

Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.

Dwilight D. Eisenhower

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

T.S Eliot

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Henry Ellis

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Genius always finds itself a century too early.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.

Epicurus

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.

Arthur Erickson

Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

Arthur Erickson

Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?

M.C. Esher

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check.

M.C. Esher

We adore chaos because we love to produce order.

M.C. Esher

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

William Faulkner

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

Jules Feiffer

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

Federico Fellini

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

Gustave Flaubert

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Gustave Flaubert

To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.

E.M Forster

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E.M Forster

I think an artist's responsibility is more complex than people realize.

Jodie Foster

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

Anatole France

What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.

Paul Gauguin

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

Paul Gauguin

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Paul Gauguin

My love of fine art increased - the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see.

Paul Getty

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.

Kahlil Gibran

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

Andre Gide

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

Johann Wolfgang vond Geoete

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them

Johann Wolfgang vond Geoete

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Johann Wolfgang vond Geoete

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

Johann Wolfgang vond Geoete

In art the best is good enough.

Johann Wolfgang vond Geoete

If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

Vincent Van Gogh

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

I cry out for order and find it only in art.

Helen Hayes

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

William Hazlitt

You don't know how much artists go through to make it look so easy. It's all in the practice.

Lauryn Hill

Anything simple always interests me.

David hockney

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

David hockney

When I make art, I think about its ability to connect with others, to bring them into the process.

Jim Hodges

Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

Oliver Wendell Holmes

The most profound things are inexpressible.

Jenny Holzer

A picture is a poem without words.

Horace

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Elbert Hubbard

The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination.

Elbert Hubbard

To love beauty is to see light.

victor Hugo

Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.

William Ralph Inge

Words are but the signs of ideas.

Samuel Johnson

Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads.

Erica Jong

Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.

Louis Kahn

Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Anish Kapoor

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal.

Elia Kazan

I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.

Elia Kazan

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

Ellen Key

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Henry A. Kissinger

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

Jerzy Kosinski

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.

Jerzy Kosinski

Have not prisons - which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe - always been universities of crime?

Peter Kropotkin

A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.

Hedy Lamarr

Andy Warhol made fame more famous.

Fran Lebowitz

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

Fran Lebowitz

You can't start at the top.

Elmer G. Letterman

I'm a study of a man in chaos in search of frenzy.

Oscar Levant

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

Roy Lichtenstein

Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

Roy Lichtenstein

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Abraham Lincoln

Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.

Franz Liszt

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma.

Hendrik Willem Van Loon

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary Boy Scout.

Melvin Maddocks

The real art of conducting consists in transitions.

Gustav Mahler

Movies were very important. The art-form of the 20th century.

Ray Manzarek

When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God.

Robert Mapplethorpe

I just think it's important to be direct and honest with people about why you're photographing them and what you're doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul.

Mary Ellen Mark

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.

Henri Matisse

I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

Henri Matisse

You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.

Henri Matisse

A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.

Henri Matisse

I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have the light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me.

Henri Matisse

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

Henri Matisse

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color - not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression.

Henri Matisse

I have been no more than a medium, as it were.

Henri Matisse

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

Henri Matisse

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

W. Somerset Maugham

All autobiography is self-indulgent.

Daphne du Maurier

Trying to force creativity is never good.

Sarah McLachlan

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Marshall McLuhan

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

Marshall McLuhan

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

Thomas Merton

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Michelangelo

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.

Michelangelo

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

Michelangelo

I always try to balance the light with the heavy - a few tears of human spirit in with the sequins and the fringes.

Bette Midler

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

Henry Miller

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.

Henry Miller

Art is science made clear.

Wilson Mizner

My trade and art is to live.

Michel de Montaigne

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

George Edward Moore

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

Henry Moore

A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds

Henry Moore

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

Kary Mullis

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is the proper task of life.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche

An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

Friedrich Nietzsche

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.

Anain Nin

The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist

Novalis

Even a true artist does not always produce art.

Carroll O'Connor

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for.

Georgia O'Keefee

It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.

Georgia O'Keefee

Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue - that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man's destruction is finished.

Georgia O'Keefee

Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them.

Thomas Paine

Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

Blaise Pascal

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game.

Octavio Paz

You've gotta be original, because if you're like someone else, what do they need you for?

Bernadette Peters

Women artists need to break barriers in order for women's experience to be valuable.

Liz Phair

The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.

Pablo Picasso

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

Pablo Picasso

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

Pablo Picasso

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

Pablo Picasso

We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

Pablo Picasso

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Pablo Picasso

My mother said to me, "If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope." Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.

Pablo Picasso

The beginning is the most important part of the work.

Plato

Every good painter paints what he is.

Jackson Pollock

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Alexander Pope

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Alexander Pope

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

Marcus Fabius Quintilian

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

Odilon Redon

Our natures are a lot like oil, mix us with anything else, and we strive to swim on top.

Joan Rivers

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need

Auguste Rodin

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Auguste Rodin

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

Carl Rogers

I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.

Jean Rostand

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

John Ruskin

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

John Ruskin

All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

John Ruskin

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

George Santayana

Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.

Friedrich Schiller

Art is the daughter of freedom.

Friedrich Schiller

Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.

Arthur Schopenhauer

My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.

Clara Schumann

To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.

Robert Schumann

All art is but imitation of nature.

Lucius Anneus Seneca

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short... if one follows patterns.

Lucius Anneus Seneca

The object of art is to give life a shape.

William Shakespeare

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

George Bernard Shaw

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

Ted Shawn

I didn't have any interest in traditional art.

Cindy Sherman

May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.

Frank Sinatra

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.

Stephen Sondheim

If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.

Mickey Spillane

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man.

Edward Steichen

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

Edward Steichen

When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.

Edward Steichen

Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.

Edward Steichen

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

Gertrude Stein

The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.

Paul Strand

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

Ignor Stravinsky

I've been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good.

Barbra Streisand

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

Jonathan Swift

That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind.

James Taylor

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

Twyla Tharp

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

Henry David Thoreau

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Henry David Thoreau

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

Lionel Trilling

There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances.

Leon Trotsky

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Harry S. Truman

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

Mark Twain

What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit.

John Updike

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

John Updike

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

Paul Valery

An artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.

Edgard Varese

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason.

Leonardo da Vinci

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them.

Andy Warhol

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

Andy Warhol

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.

Andy Warhol

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone's got to take care of all your details.

Andy Warhol

I like boring things.

Andy Warhol

Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

Andy Warhol

I am deeply superficial person.

Andy Warhol

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

Simone Weil

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

Oscar Wilde

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Oscar Wilde

All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

Oscar Wilde

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

Oscar Wilde

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Oscar Wilde

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

Oscar Wilde

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.

Tom Wolfe

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

William Wordsworth

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines - so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings.

Frank Lloyd Wright

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Frank Lloyd Wright

It is difficult to make political art work.

Thom Yorke

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

Emile Zola