Top 100 All Art Quotes
#1. I think all art is subjective - that whoever's watching it or listening to it will decide whether it's good or bad.
Billy Boyd
#2. All art is a form of vulnerability because at least part of the artist goes into the piece.
A.D. Posey
#3. All art does but consist in the removal of surplusage.
Walter Pater
#4. All art stems from a place of alienation. Intimate and alone. Most people are oppressed by the opinion of others, but I was not that way. I was afraid of the repercussions of not doing what I was told to do, what I was called to do by a creator.
CeeLo Green
#5. The truth and the facts aren't necessarily the same thing. Telling the truth is the object of all art; facts are what the unimaginative have instead of ideas.
A.A. Gill
#6. But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.
William Carlos Williams
#7. All art is dependent on technology because it's a human endeavour, so even when you're using charcoal on a wall or designed the proscenium arch, that's technology.
George Lucas
#8. 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
#9. All art is a vision penetrating the illusions of reality, and photography is one form of this vision and revelation.
Ansel Adams
#10. Society is indeed a contract ... It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection.
Edmund Burke
#12. It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.
Pierre Boulez
#13. Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.
Paul Theroux
#14. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
Oscar Wilde
#15. Point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor's craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath
Oscar Wilde
#16. It's not about facts, it's about feelings. It's about remembering feelings and happiness. A definition of art is that it makes concrete our most subtle emotions. I think the highest form of art is music. It's the most abstract of all art expression.
Agnes Martin
#17. Kitsch parodies catharsis ... It is in vain to try to draw the boundaries abstractly between aesthetic fiction and kitsch's emotional plunder. It is a poison admixed to all art; excising it is today one of art's despairing efforts ...
Theodor Adorno
#18. All art is an intensely vulnerable gesture, and it is made with no small amounts of risk, and fear. So, I have plenty of sympathy for self-defense mechanisms, especially among artists.
Steven Erikson
#19. Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
Ray Bradbury
#20. All art is unstable. Its meaning is not necessarily that implied by the author, There is no authoritative active voice. There are only multiple readings.
David Bowie
#21. All art is only done by the individual. The individual is all you ever have and all schools only serve to classify their members as failures.
Ernest Hemingway,
#22. Falling in love is the beginning of all wisdom, all sympathy, all compassion, all art, all religion; and in it's larger sense is the one thing in life worth doing.
Elbert Hubbard
#23. All art needs to be funny, sad and a little disturbing simultaneously or else it's not art.
Ezekiel Tyrus
#24. The creation is a very internal process, and publishing the book is a very external process. It is nice to see the book out in the world and people having the same reaction as when I created it. The point of all art is the emotional transference, and when that happens, the book has succeeded.
Elliot Ackerman
#25. All art forms employ some means through which images become real.
Elliot W. Eisner
#26. ...for all art is one, as Kipling has written, and your art chooses you, not you the art.
Michael Powell
#27. The man who speaks and writes about art should refrain from censuring or pontificating. He will thus avoid doing anything foolish, for in the presence of primordial depth all art is but dream and nature.
Hans Arp
#28. That's what all art is for. Your creations can become anything to anyone. I've realized there's nothing wrong with letting people escape for a few hours. Plus you should hear about all the sex lives I'm saving.
Karina Halle
#29. All art moves between the extremes.
Jan Fries
#30. The great moral question of the 21st century is this: if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?
Eben Moglen
#31. All art points to others with whom the writer argues about what is ... He must have models with which to agree ... or outright oppose ... for Nature seems to remain silence.
Charles Bartlett Johnson
#32. I think the first duty of all art, including fiction of any kind, is to entertain. That is to say, to hold interest. No matter how worthy the message of something, if it's dull, you're just not communicating.
-Poul_Anderson
Poul Anderson
#34. Like all art, nonfiction film should invite, seduce, or force us to confront the most difficult, frightening or mysterious aspects of what it means to be human.
Joshua Oppenheimer
#36. If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.
George Santayana
#37. All art is probably erotic in its ultimate character, but painting more than anything else is a purely nervous erotic activity.
Patrick Swift
#38. As all Art depends on Vision, so the different kinds of Art depend on the different ways in which minds look at things.
George Henry Lewes
#39. All art to me is an empathetic act. Whoever's telling a story is trying to transfer emotion into someone else.
Elliot Ackerman
#40. As my uncle always says, 'If your vibe outweighs your substance, you're destined to be a novelty.' I think that is true in all art.
Mat Kearney
#41. All art is propaganda; on the other hand, not all propaganda is art.
George Orwell
#44. 154Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, to where no one can go any further.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#46. All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.
Walter Pater
#47. Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
Pauline Kael
#49. Perhaps this is the purpose of all art, all writing, on the murders, fiction and non-fiction:
Simply to participate.
Alan Moore
#50. All art is immortal. For emotion for the sake of emotion is the aim of art, and emotion for the sake of action is the aim of life.
Oscar Wilde
#51. The Symbol of all Art is the Prism. The goal is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism into the secret glories it contains.
E. E. Cummings
#52. Condemning art as manipulative is a non sequitur, of course. All art is manipulative.
Steve Erickson
#54. Books, like all art, breed in us desire. In times of crisis and fear and misrepresentation we need desire, or else we shut down and hide out in our houses, succumbing to infotainment and the ease of an available latte, turning off our brains and emotions. Books breed desire.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#55. I try not to make any boundaries. I try to let all art influence me.
Joseph Trapanese
#56. Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimacy. All art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, each work is the implementation of this original fault, from which comes a risky plenitude and new light.
Maurice Blanchot
#58. Whether we know it or not, we are all in a quest after the Great Companion. All study, all art, all music, all literature, all government, all industry are in essence a search after the Infinite.
Lyman Abbott
#59. All art constantly aspires to the condition of music ... In its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; they inhere in and completely saturate each other ...
Walter Pater
#60. I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.
Richard Avedon
#61. I regard the theater as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being. This supremacy of the theater derives from the fact that it is always "now" on the stage.
Thornton Wilder
#62. I feel the theatre is the most unique one of all [the arts] for collaboration. I feel very fortunate to be in a field where I really do get to have long conversations with the visual artists, the actors, the musicians. It's all art forms rolled into one and I feel very fortunate to be a part of it.
Susan Stroman
#63. We want Realism's wealth of experience and Symbolism's depth of feeling. All art is a problem of balance between two opposites.
Cesare Pavese
#66. Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#67. I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative.The other thing that I'm interested in, which is tangential, but not unrelated ... All art to me is about problem solving.
Steven Soderbergh
#68. Once you have hundreds of millions of dollars, it's hard to know where to put it all. Art is transportable, unregulated, glamorous, arcane, beautiful, difficult. It is easier to store than oil, more esoteric than diamonds, more durable than political influence.
Nick Paumgarten
#69. The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years.
Jerry Saltz
#70. All art, literature, and music must be born in your heart's blood. Art is your heart's blood.
Edvard Munch
#71. All art is based on non-conformity.
Ben Shahn
#72. Great food, like all art, enhances and reflects a community's vitality, growth and solidarity. Yet history bears witness that great cuisines spring only from healthy local agriculture.
Rick Bayless
#73. I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
Thornton Wilder
#74. All art at some time and in some manner becomes mass entertainment, and if it does not it dies and is forgotten.
Raymond Chandler
#75. Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life.
John Millington Synge
#76. All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.
August Wilson
#77. The power of nature is what all art strives to be. The more we can get in tune with the harmony of the planet, the more our art can benefit from that relationship.
Rick Rubin
#78. With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable.
Ansel Adams
#79. All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist.
Paul Klee
#80. Great art is always a balancing act. But all art has both - an emotional content and an intellectual content.
George L. Carlson
#81. That should be the goal for all art, to be as simple as a flashcard.
John Baldessari
#82. All art emulates the condition of ritual. That is what it comes from and to that it must always return for nourishment.
T. S. Eliot
#83. Life as it should be: all friends, all art, all music, all love, all the time.
Amanda Palmer
#84. Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.
Felix Dennis
#86. All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.
Iris Murdoch
#87. It is the mission of all art to express the highest and most beautiful ideals of man.
Isadora Duncan
#89. If what has happened in the one person were communicated directly to the other, all art would collapse, all the effects of art would disappear.
Paul Valery
#90. My cloud photographs are equivalents of my most profound life experiences, my basic philosophy of life. All art is an equivalent of the artist's most profound life experiences.
Alfred Stieglitz
#91. Art is about energy positive and negative. All art has the power to heal because it helps us see who we are, and what we resist.
Shirley Maclaine
#92. If I make a painting, it should be seen for what it's set out to do too. A lot of the things that I do, it's not all art. Some of it's design, some of it's illustration, some of it's graphics, some of it's concept, some of it's business and some of it, hopefully, is art.
Ken Done
#93. All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.
Upton Sinclair
#94. One does not set out with the idea that I've just had a great idea and now I'm going to go and carry it out. Almost all art that's made like that doesn't go anywhere.
Anish Kapoor
#96. Women are our most miraculous muse, an enchanted intangibility that encourages all art.
CeeLo Green
#97. The public is the tribunal before which all art is judged - not the critics or the academies. The public is the artist's only patron, and has certain fundamental rights. It will submit to education, and will respond to suggestion, but it will not be bullied.
Walter J. Phillips
#99. Custom, that is before all law; Nature, that is above all art.
Samuel Daniel
#100. Art frees us from our prejudices and gives us the chance to become our best selves, individuals who dare to dream. And even if those dreams aren't always as pretty as we'd like, or don't conform, or frighten us, it is our duty to encourage art to flourish. All art. Every kind.
M.J. Rose
