Art And Reality Quotes

#1. The idea of the person enters poetics where art and reality, or intentionality and circumstance, meet.

Lyn Hejinian

#2. It is the transcendent (or 'abstract' or 'self-contained') nature of music that the new so called concretism
Pop Art, eighteen-hour slices-of-reality films, musique concrete
opposes. But instead of bringing art and reality closer together, the new movement merely thins out the distinction.

Igor Stravinsky

#3. Only Art is Eternal Wisdom; what is not Art soon perishes. Art is the unconscious love of all things. 'Learning' will cease and Reality will become known when it comes to pass that every human being is an Artist.

Austin Osman Spare

#4. Living is not an art, but to write of life is. Life is a series of accidents and anticlimaxes, misremembered and misunderstood, with lessons only dimly learned. Life is disorganized, lacks shape, lacks story.

Christopher Priest

#5. An art of expression should begin with childhood, and the lucid use of one's mother tongue should be typical of that art.
The sense of reality should be strengthened from the beginning, yet by no means at the cost of those lofty illusions we call patriotism, veneration, love.

Louis Sullivan

#6. Black and white is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive ...

Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality.

Roger Ballen

#7. So you might say, 'Why do you end up making theatre in a world in which there is already too much of that? Creating layer upon layer of artifice?' Perhaps the function is to pierce through that cloud and show reality - so the function of art is to make things - to show: 'Hang on, this is real.'

Simon McBurney

#8. Life imitates art and art imitates life until both imitate imitation - Reality TV.

Brian Spellman

#9. There is in reality no such thing as modern art. Art is carried on up and down in immense cycles through centuries and civilizations.

Hans Hofmann

#10. I like looking back at art-work or my writing and seeing it in a different perspective...It shows how much one has grown as a creator. Perfection may not exist in reality but I always strive to capture the beauty in whatever I happen to be doing.

Alexander Lloyd Curran

#11. But perhaps the the great work of art has less importance in itself than in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer to his naked reality.

Albert Camus

#12. No one gets up after death-there is no applause-there is only silence and some second-hand clothes, and that's death.

Tom Stoppard

#13. Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.

Robert M. Pirsig

#14. To make the material speak to man in the name of man, this is the aim and reality of art.

Asger Jorn

#15. Possible reality [is obtained] by slightly bending physical and chemical laws.

Marcel Duchamp

#16. If you do not bother to take the time to compose and to light properly, then you end up with something almost less than reality. You end up without the soul, the heart, the art of the moment.

Vilmos Zsigmond

#17. Art is the close scrutiny of reality and therefore I put on the stage only those things that I know happen in our society.

Edward Bond

#18. When I look at the 'Rocky Balboa' film when I played the undisputed heavyweight champion, I feel like art is going to imitate life. I played the champ in a movie and I'm going to become the champ in reality.

Antonio Tarver

#19. All creative art is magic , is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind , pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality .

Joseph Conrad

#20. Art comes into being in that abstract interval between a thought and reality, and no one - not even the artist who created it - can remeasure the influences that caused it.

Edgar Alwin Payne

#21. Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

Donna Tartt

#22. I think comedy has evolved like every art form, and people probably do less standing around and telling jokes, and more things that have to do with reality.

Adam Carolla

#23. Nothing could be further from the authentic art of our time than the idea of a rupture of continuity. Art is - among other things - continuity, and unthinkable without it.

Clement Greenberg

#24. Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.

Publilius Syrus

#25. The best music for her was always the stuff you could relate to, the stuff that spoke directly to you and twisted and knotted itself so far into your life you couldn't tell where art ended and reality began.

Stephen Emond

#26. There is no truth beyond illusion ... between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where reality comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and magic.

Donna Tartt

#27. Revolutionary art and visionary physics are both investigations into the nature of reality.

Leonard Shlain

#28. Art and morality are, with certain provisos ... one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

Iris Murdoch

#29. My whole art is based on escaping life and reality, which might not the best tendency to have when you're trying to be a good person in general. But people can escape into my world easily - artists are supposed to create a keyhole that people can look into.

Lykke Li

#30. My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.

J. M. W. Turner

#31. I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.

Ian Caldwell

#32. Appearance should never attain reality, And if nature conquers, then must art retire.

Friedrich Schiller

#33. The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.

Marcel Proust

#34. Without art we would be nothing but foreground and live entirely in the spell of that perspective which makes what is closest at hand and most vulgar appear as if it were vast, and reality itself.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#35. One way of understanding a graphic novel is that it's an ambitious comic and one way or another my comics have had ambitions. I have no problem with escapism. When I get my depressions all I want to do is escape reality.

Art Spiegelman

#36. Curiously, anatomical reality in art was apparently a horrifying concept to the same men and women who lined up to see bodies at the morgue.

Deborah Davis

#37. A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

Dylan Thomas

#38. What is Christian in art does not lie in the theme but in the spirit of it, in its wisdom and the understanding of reality it reflects.

Hans Rookmaaker

#39. A piece of art, when completed, encapsulates its own reality. As its architect, the artist's task is to craft it well enough that the reader believes in its existence and is willing to enter, explore, and engage based on the artist's version of the truth, even if that truth is artifice.

Kate Kearns

#40. Art is both a vengeance against reality and a reconciliation with it.

Francine Du Plessix Gray

#41. To put all this in the form of another traditional metaphor, aesthetic styles - patterns for communicating feeling and thought - become dull with use, like carving knives, and since dullness is the chief enemy of art, each generation of artists must find new ways of slicing the fat off reality.

John Gardner

#42. Overall, books and art were a safer escape from reality than sleep.

Lisa Cach

#43. Art's role (like philosophy's) is not to criticize reality but to change it; and little change can be effected if art remains a cloistered domain.

Richard Shusterman

#44. I've always been a dreamer, have always believed
in the power of love and art and loud, life-affirming rock and roll, but, for the first time,
I'm starting to have doubts. Can a dream even exist in reality? Or does it turn to stone
the second it leaves your mind?

Pete Wentz

#45. In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.

Eugenio Montale

#46. Is there in every work of art something which shows reality as one and also something which shows reality as many and diverse? - must every work of art have a simultaneous presence of oneness and manyness, unity and variety?

Eli Siegel

#47. Now it is done. Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.

Red Smith

#48. Shamanic journeying is the inner art of traveling to the 'invisible worlds' beyond ordinary reality to retrieve information for change in any area of your life - from spirituality and health to work and relationships.

Sandra Ingerman

#49. I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.

Orhan Pamuk

#50. To mistake ugliness for reality is one of the frauds of the realistic school [of writing]. A hunger for the unknown and an aspiration toward beauty were inseparable from civilization. In America the word art was distorted to mean artificial.

Anais Nin

#51. The purpose of art is ... to press forward into the whole of the external world and the soul, to see and communicate those objective realities within it which rule and convention have hitherto concealed.

Max Scheler

#52. You cannot set art off in a corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality, and substance.

Charles Ives

#53. The art of being a great entrepreneur is finding the right balance between vision and reality.

Giff Constable

#54. For me art is a continuous discovery into reality, an exploration of visual data which has been going on for centuries, each artist contributing to the next generation's advancement. I wanted to go a step further and extend the boundaries.

Audrey Flack

#55. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us. Let us spend our lives in conceiving then. The poet or the artist never yet had so fair and noble a design but some of his posterity at least could accomplish it.

Henry David Thoreau

#56. Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion.

Francoise Sagan

#57. If you do not master the art of self discipline- you will succumb to the emotions and reality of regret.

John Assaraf

#58. The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines.

Joseph Conrad

#59. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#60. I have always felt a connection between daily life and art ... my reality has been my key.

Mirella Freni

#61. I like to work in the real world, so I do a lot of searching or just simple looking. But I'm not above tweaking reality and making something up. I don't think there are any rules in art. It's not so much what you see as it is the significance you, the artist, see in it.

Keith Carter

#62. Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

Henri Bergson

#63. We know that behind every image revealed there is another image more faithful to reality, and in the back of that image there is another, and yet another behind the last one, and so on, up to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that no one will ever see.

Michelangelo Antonioni

#64. By translating their inner turmoil or understanding into art, artists challenge the accepted notions of reality and create new ones.

Wes Nisker

#65. Everybody thinks they know what art should be. But very few of them have the sense that is necessary to experience painting, that is the sense of sight, that sees colors and forms as living reality in the picture.

Otto Dix

#66. Truth and reality in art begin at the point where the artist ceases to understand what he is doing and capable of doing - yet feels in himself a force that becomes steadily stronger ... and more concentrated.

Henri Matisse

#67. For there is a way back from imagination to reality and that is - art.

Sigmund Freud

#68. Any artist is insulted by the suggestion that art is merely a matter of recording reality, and knows that it is impossible to explain how imagination can transform not only events and people, but the artist as well, into quite different "realities".

Joan Lindsay

#69. Art's only concern with the real is to abolish it, and to substitute for it a new reality

Jean Rousset

#70. Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.

Lou Dorfsman

#71. In many respects, theater is still grappling with problems of reality and representation that the visual art movement realized were unimportant many years ago.

Tim Crouch

#72. 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

#73. I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

Oscar Wilde

#74. Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and ... it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.

Louis De Bernieres

#75. In the world of reality the more beautiful a work of art, the longer, we may be sure, was the time required to make it, and the greater the number of different minds which assisted in its development.

Lafcadio Hearn

#76. Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God.

Patrick Swift

#77. How can anybody learn anything from an artwork when the piece of art only reflects the vanity of the artist and not reality?

Lou Reed

#78. If there was no risk, it wouldn't be art. It wouldn't be worth making. There is risk even in a fairy tale. Fiction is closest to pure narrative, and pure narrative is simply the logic we try to impose on an ever-changing reality.

Chris Abani

#79. He had come abroad to enjoy the Flemish painters and all others; but what fair-tressed saint of Van Eyck or Memling was so interesting a figure as Madame de Mauves?

Henry James

#80. Without arts programmes there's only reality TV, and reality TV needs the arts to show it what reality is.

Billy Connolly

#81. The sophisticated concern about art sinks before a spontaneous love of reality, and I thank the photograph for being so transparent a vehicle for things ...

George Santayana

#82. Science for me is very close to art. Scientific discovery is an irrational act. It's an intuition which turns out to be reality at the end of it-and I see no difference between a scientist developing a marvellous discovery and an artist making a painting.

Carlo Rubbia

#83. I really think that's what music and art is about. It's another way to connect to the divine. It's a real pure way of touching that deeper reality beneath our life.

Kathy Mattea

#84. 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

#85. One advantage of the discovery of the Photographic Art will be, that it will enable us to introduce into our pictures a multitude of minute details which add to the truth and reality of the representation, but which no artist would take the trouble to faithfully copy from nature.

Henry Fox Talbot

#86. Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance.

Henri Matisse

#87. Let Art be your weapon, and you would never be defeated.

Bam Zakariya

#88. A fine memoir is to a fine novel as a well-wrought blanket is to a fancifully embroidered patchwork quilt. The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape. Fiction has no practical purpose. Fiction, after all, is art.

Julia Glass

#89. One has to guard against a formula that is good for everything, that can interpret reality in addition to the other arts, and that rather than creating can only result in a style, or a stylization.

Georges Braque

#90. The image of feeling created by artists, in every kind of art
plastic, musical, poetic, balletic
serves to hold the reality itself for our labile and volatile memory, as a touchstone to test the scope of our intellectual constructions.

Susanne Katherina Langer

#91. All I wanted was my art and the chance to be the creator of my own world, my own reality.

Charlotte Eriksson

#92. If the abstract paintings show my reality, then the landscapes and still-lifes show my yearning.

Gerhard Richter

#93. Works of Art are meant to connect the human heart to inspiration, for cosmic consciousness to grow in the Supreme Reality rooted in Life and Being.

Nelly Mazloum

#94. 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

#95. Lying is the only art form that the public sanctions and instinctively prefers to reality.

Jean Cocteau

#96. If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.

Henri Bergson

#97. Art is a thing where, the least likely thing that you think is going to be art, is precisely the thing that is going to be art. And I would even hold that true to a reality television show ... maybe the entire overarching process of the show actually exists as an artistic structure.

Richard Phillips

#98. It's been said that horror films are experimental forms of art, and I agree. As an actress, you're put in positions and have to experience emotions that are way beyond reality, whether fighting in a post-apocalyptic world or being possessed by the Devil.

Ashley Bell

#99. Tattooing, when understood in its entirety, must be seen as a religious act. The human being brings forth images from the center of the self and communicates them to the world. Fantasy is embodied in reality and the person is made whole.

Spider Webb

#100. Detail is the heart of realism, and the fatty degeneration of art.

Clive Bell