Top 100 All Great Art Quotes
#1. There is a great promise for our cultural growth, but this promise is achieved only when our artists recognize that all great art has nationality, an imprimatur achieved with the keenest remembrance of time and place.
F. Sionil Jose
#2. All great art is an imperfect, halting attempt to catch up upon life.
John Edgar Park
#4. Truthfullness to life-both fantasy life and factual life-is the basis of all great art.
Maurice Sendak
#8. The underlying purpose of all art is to create patterns of imagery which somehow convey a sense of life set in a framework of order ... all great art ... harmonises consciousness with the ego-transcending Self.
Christopher Booker
#9. All great art comes from a sense of outrage.
Glenn Close
#10. All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.
William, Saroyan
#11. All great art is a form of complaint
John Cage
#13. All truly great art is optimistic. The individual artist is happy in his creative work. The fact that practically all great art is tragic does not in any way change the above thesis.
Upton Sinclair
#14. All great art is the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own.
John Ruskin
#15. All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.
Alexander Trocchi
#16. All great art originates from the innocent child within us expressing itself through the wisdom, experience and skill of an adult.
Richard Schmid
#17. It's rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts. It's what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.
John Fowles
#18. In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a place, a time, and a Zeitgeist.
Richard M. Weaver
#19. Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth.
John Ruskin
#21. All great art is almost never received well initially; don't quit before the world opens its eyes.
Gregor Collins
#22. All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.
John Ruskin
#23. All great art commences with a vision, and perhaps it may be that the vision is closer to God than that which is ultimately created by the artist's brush. There will always be human flaws in the execution. Only in the mind can the artist achieve true perfection.
John Connolly
#24. All great art is born of the metropolis.
Ezra Pound
#25. I feel like the movie is reminding people of who they are, which is what I think all great art does.
Brie Larson
#26. I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art.
Oscar Wilde
#27. All great art contains an element of the irrational.
Edith Sitwell
#28. I think that all great art never strives to answer any questions; it just asks the appropriate ones at the appropriate time.
Rhys Ifans
#29. All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.
Dorothy Thompson
#30. All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
Eric Hoffer
#31. All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.
Susan Sontag
#33. the object of all great art is beauty, and it makes us nostalgic for God. Whether we consider ourselves people of faith or not, art arouses in us what the pope calls a 'universal desire for redemption.
Ian Morgan Cron
#34. Mrs. Nixon and I share the sorrow of millions of Americans at the death of Louis Armstrong. One of the architects of an American art form, a free and individual spirit, and an artist of worldwide fame, his great talents and magnificent spirit added richness and pleasure to all our lives.
Richard M. Nixon
#35. I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle ... In great art, this conflict is hidden, it is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is disturbing - not perfect.
Henry Moore
#37. My imagination was a great place to escape from all the anxiety and disapproval of my life ... I had to live in my head ... art was a way of making myself feel better.
Philip Schultz
#38. I will give a proof to demonstrate with facts that there are no rules in painting and that oppression or servile obligation of making all study or follow the same path is a great impediment for the young who profess this very difficult art.
Francisco Goya
#39. the best of Cervantes is untranslatable, and this undeniable fact is in itself an incentive [for one and all] to learn Spanish.
Aubrey F.G. Bell
#40. Cookery is a wholly unselfish art: as 'art for art's sake' it is unthinkable. A man may sing in his bath every morning without the least encouragement, but no cook can cook just for his or her own sake in a like manner. All good cooks, like all great artists, must have an audience worth cooking for.
Andre Simon
#41. I say that the art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good.
Benvenuto Cellini
#42. I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I've just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it's not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.
Sylvester Stallone
#43. A great work of art, if it accomplishes anything, serves to remind us, or let us say to set us dreaming, of all that is fluid and intangible.
Henry Miller
#44. art of resting the mind and the power of dismissing from it all care and worry is probably one of the secrets of our great men. - Capt. J. A. Hatfield
David Allen
#45. There's an audience for all kinds of great art.
Robin Thicke
#46. Dick Clark was a really great influence in my career; he helped me a lot with his whole organization, and they were awesome to me at all different points - but one thing that I really disagreed with him on was when he said that what I do, pop music, is a disposable art form.
Cyndi Lauper
#47. All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.
Marcel Proust
#48. Giving style to one's character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#49. Anyone would think a thin stick like me, weak and miserable would go down with everything: do you think I get more than my cough every winter? I bet I live till ninety, with all my aches and pains. To think that's fifty more years of the Great-I-Am.
Christina Stead
#50. I am one of the great wasters of time. I have made it an art form. I can get up at 8 o'clock in the morning, be out of the house by 8:30 and back by 5 P.M., and I'll be going all day long and accomplish absolutely nothing. It's an amazing talent.
Bob Newhart
#51. All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it
W.B.Yeats
#52. Time is not a great artist but weakens all he touches.
William Hogarth
#53. When I travel, I draw and paint sketches which is great fun. And as long as you are fully aware that it has nothing to do with actual art, I think that's all right.
Arne Jacobsen
#54. Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight.
John Cusack
#55. All the great captains have performed vast achievements by conforming with the rules of art
by adjusting efforts to obstacles.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#56. Music is art, art is life, and we are who we are, and all of these aforementioned women, unless they should choose not to, will be performing well into the next many decades because they are great artists.
Lara St. John
#57. All truly great art is propaganda ...
Ann Petry
#58. Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
Marcel Proust
#59. My mother was the most creative, fantastic person and would come up with great things for us to do. She'd buy art supplies and all of us would sit around painting. I was lucky.
Cher
#60. Many great authors of the 19th century wrote under conditions of strict censorship. The great thing about the art of writing a novel, is that you can write about anything. All you have to say is that it's fiction.
Orhan Pamuk
#61. When thou art at thy worst and lowest, yet 'underneath' thee 'are everlasting arms'. Sin may drag thee ever so low, but Christ's great atonement is still under all.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#62. There is one great and universal wish of mankind expressed in all religions, in all art and philosophy, and in all human life: the wish to pass beyond himself as he now is.
Beatrice M. Hinkle
#63. I suggest that the great art belongs to all people, all the time
that indeed it is made for the people, by the people, to the people.
Maya Angelou
#64. Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.
Oscar Wilde
#65. There's something about being able to literally consume a work of art - then to divide all that pleasure of it - because it's a memory. A great wine for me is a memory, it's an extraordinary experience.
Robert B. Parker
#66. General belief is "There is no real magic, only tricks" but a great magician compel people not to trust that belief and make them believe, after all "There does exist a real magic".
Amit Kalantri
#67. We all know that the great memories of our childhood are the little triumphs - it doesn't really matter whether that was in writing, art, on the hockey field or on the football field. It's something that makes you feel - 'I can do this stuff.'
Michael Morpurgo
#68. All great movies have one thing in common: every frame of every scene could stand alone as a work of art. Why should it be different in a book?
Sean Hinn
#69. Fear is a great motivator. Look at what 9-11 has accomplished - My god. It's slammed the economy, It's - I can't even begin to detail all it's actually done, other than bring down the buildings and hit the Pentagon. It's stunned the entire nation.
Art Bell
#70. All that the world needs most today, is combined in the most deductive manner in his art; the three great stimulants of exhausted people: brutality, artificiality, and innocence (idiocy).
Friedrich Nietzsche
#71. The art of living is to rise above lesser things so that we can truly enjoy great things. And the message of Christmas is the greatest of all things.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#72. To explain away the mystery of a great painting - if such a feat were possible - would do irreparable harm ... If there is no mystery, then there is no poetry, the quality I value above all else in art.
Georges Braque
#73. In great art there is no beginning and end in point of time. All time is comprehended.
Robert Henri
#74. Every great work of art should be considered like any work of nature. First of all from the point of view of its aesthetic reality and then not just from its development and the mastery of its creation but from the standpoint of what has moved and agitated its creator.
Amedeo Modigliani
#75. If you subtracted all of the great artists who never drank, who never went to excess, you wouldn't have any more art left. What kind of poem are you gonna get out of a glass of iced tea?
David Lee Roth
#76. All happenings, great and small, are parables whereby God speaks. The art of life is to get the message. To see all that is offered us at the windows of the soul, and to reach out and receive what is offered, this is the art of living.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#77. The skill, the art of literacy is a gift. To read is to watch in your mind as a single word explodes into a confetti of images. Truly, of all the gifts given to man, reading is most sacred, For from words come dreams and from dreams come great tomorrows.
Stephen Cosgrove
#78. If all you boast of your great art be true; Sure, willing poverty lives most in you.
Ben Jonson
#79. He said, I suppose there are people who are purely moved by great art. I never met a painter who was. I'm not. All I think of when I see that picture is that it has the supreme mastery I have spent all my life trying to attain. And shall not. Ever.
John Fowles
#80. All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us all that we are more alike than we are unlike.
Maya Angelou
#81. Darkness, thou first great parent of us all,
Thou art our great original!
Thomas Yalden
#82. Work! labor the asparagus me of life; the one great sacrament of humanity from which all other things flow - security, leisure, joy, art, literature, even divinity itself.
Sean O'Casey
#83. Bicycles are pieces of art. You get that combination of kinetic engineering, but then, besides the welds, the paint jobs, the kind of the sculpture of it all is quite beautiful. Bikes have such great lines, and all different styles.
Robin Williams
#84. Everything that now exists, no matter how great and good it is, lasts for a time, fulfills a purpose, and then passes on. And so it will be with all the works of art that now exist; an eternal veil of forgetfulness will lie over them, just as there is now over those things that came before.
Adalbert Stifter
#85. Art has two constant, two unending concerns: It always meditates on death and thus always creates life. All great, genuine art resembles and continues the Revelation of St John.
Boris Pasternak
#86. It is something that artists do all the time unconsciously, working in the style of someone they consider a great master. I just wanted to make that relationship literal.
Sherrie Levine
#87. When you're actually making a film, it's just people on your back all the time wanting stuff and you're constantly having to it deal with them. It's probably the most time consuming of all the arts, but I do love it because it is a great mix of visual art and music and writing.
Taika Waititi
#88. An art is only great and significant if it is one that all may enjoy. The art of a clique is but a plaything.
W. Somerset Maugham
#89. I am adamant that we must not cut back on funding of the teaching of the arts in the schools: music, painting, theater, dance, all of it. The great thing about the arts is that the only way you learn how to do it is by doing it.
David McCullough
#90. 1988 I also received from the city of Vienna the cross of honour for art and science. These titles and the various honors mean a great deal to me, most of all for the reason that they would mean a great deal to my parents too.
Leon Askin
#91. Few enjoyments are given from the open and liberal hand of nature; but by art, labor and industry we can extract them in great abundance. Hence, the ideas of property become necessary in all civil society.
David Hume
#92. The great end of all arts is to make an impression on the imagination and the feeling. The imitation of nature frequently does this. Sometimes it fails and something else succeeds.
Joshua Reynolds
#93. All great literature has an uncreeded and luminous theology behind it ... Art [is] a form of active prayer.
Melissa Pritchard
#94. A world is supported by four things: the learning of wise, the justice of great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing without a ruler who knows the art of ruling.
Frank Herbert
#95. As I developed as an artist and studied art history, I noticed that all the great works were dealing with the human condition. [Art] had humor in it. It had sex in it. But it also had sorrow running through it.
Eric Drooker
#96. Observe that it is a great error to believe that all mediums of art are not closely tied to their time.
Camille Pissarro
#97. The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
William James
#98. I have this theory that I hold on to, the theory that everything great in art and in life in general is jazz. It's just like all these things that just kind of seem to fall into place. You know, like mistakes that somehow turn into something beautiful.
Jerrod Carmichael
#99. I now require this of all pictures, that they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been simple, and all great pictures are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#100. If it is the mark of the artist to love art before everything, to renounce everything for its sake, to think all the sweet human things of life well lost if only he may attain something, do some good, great work - then I was never an artist.
Ellen Terry
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