Top 100 Art By Quotes
#1. I know now that everybody in the arts is forever a beginner. Experience counts for a great deal and very little. Every night onstage I feel I am starting from scratch, still not quite sure what I am doing and where I am going, thrown by the simplest thing that goes wrong.
Joan Rivers
#2. Art has to be, you know, trade itself, conform to the old strict guidelines set forth by how it was going to act in the future.
Immortal Technique
#3. Art serves us best precisely at that point where it can shift our sense of what is possible, when we know more than we knew before, when we feel we have - by some manner of a leap - encountered the truth. That, by the logic of art, is always worth the pain.
T. S. Eliot
#4. It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.
Michel De Montaigne
#5. By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip hop's critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible effect it has on youth.
Michael Eric Dyson
#6. Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.
Roger Kimball
#7. In the Raphael Room, the secret turned out to be that only some of the paintings were made by the great master; the rest were made by students. I had liked the ones by Raphael. This was a big jab for my self-confidence in my ability to appreciate art.
Richard P. Feynman
#8. I'm really inspired by the interplay of visual art and music, a total artistic environment where there's sound and visuals. When I think about that I get stimulated and excited. It's a feeling that you can't label with words.
Black Francis
#9. Genuinely great humour recognises the world it's describing and yet we are also called into question by it. That's what great art should do. That's what great philosophy should do. The one thing about humour is that this is an everyday practice that does this.
Simon Critchley
#10. Entertainment and art have power. Our culture is molded more so by entertainment than any other influence.
Michael Landon Jr.
#11. No form of art repeats or imitates successfully all that can be said by another; the writer conveys his experience of life along a channel of communication closed to painter, mathematician, musician, film-maker.
Storm Jameson
#12. But the young sapper was already on his back, the rifle aimed, his eye almost brushing the beards of Noah and Abraham and the variety of demons until he reached the great face and was stilled by it, the face like a spear, wise, unforgiving.
Michael Ondaatje
#13. As great a picture can be made as one's mental capacity-no greater. Art cannot be taught; it must be self-inspiration, though the imagination may be fired and the ambition and work directed by the advice and example of others.
Edward Weston
#14. Art calls for complete mastery of techniques, developed by reflection within the soul.
Bruce Lee
#15. It is only by being bold that you get anywhere. If you are a risk-taker, then the art is to protect the downside.
Richard Branson
#16. Militarism has been by far the commonest cause of the breakdown of civilizations. The single art of war makes progress at the expense of all the arts of peace.
Arnold Joseph Toynbee
#17. Art comes from a visceral need and is usually generated by something I have seen; writing comes from something that happens in my head and my heart.
E.L. Konigsburg
#18. We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.
Clive Bell
#19. To sought out solace within yourself is the most difficult challenge and is quickly ignored by many, thus can only be achieved when you find truth within oneself
Yolanda De Iuliis
#20. To be bound by traditional martial art style or styles is the way of the mindless, enslaved martial artist. But to be inspired by the traditional martial art and to achieve further heights is the way of genius.
Bruce Lee
#21. The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.
Auguste Rodin
#22. A photograph can, by the addition of an unimportant spot of color, become a photomontage, a work of art of a special kind.
John Heartfield
#23. Bit by bit, putting it together ...
Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art.
Every moment makes a contribution,
Every little detail plays a part.
Having just the vision's no solution,
Everything depends on execution,
Putting it together, that's what counts.
Stephen Sondheim
#24. Count art by gold, and it fetters the feet it once winged.
Ouida
#25. As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.
Chuck Palahniuk
#26. Thou art gone from my gaze like a beautiful dream. And I seek thee in vain by the meadow and stream.
George Linley
#27. The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is ... political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.
Amiri Baraka
#28. Country and western is ignored by the intellectuals. They don't look at it as an art form. They think it's just somebody sitting on his couch singing about his life.
Ricky Skaggs
#30. True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
Albert Einstein
#31. Art you can flush down the loo means nothing to me, even were the loo to be selected by Marcel Duchamp
Andrew O'Hagan
#32. Smugness was an art invented by the race of imps, no matter what cats might claim, so he did it very well indeed,
Spider Robinson
#33. The maker movement is mostly about building things (whether low-tech or high-tech), as well as creating art and music. But it's driven by project-based, peer-to-peer learning, which tends to happen as novice "makers
Warren Berger
#34. A script arrived, and on the front cover - scrawled really big, as if it were a book report - is 'Django Unchained, written by Quentin Tarantino.' And I thought, 'Well, no art department came up with this; this is Quentin's writing.'
Dennis Christopher
#35. Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which states seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of arts, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by means of war.
Randolph Bourne
#36. In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends ... They are still a minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response.
F.R. Leavis
#37. To see distinctly the machinery
the wheels and pinions
of any work of Art is, unquestionably, of itself, a pleasure, but one which we are able to enjoy only just in proportion as we do not enjoy the legitimate effect designed by the artist.
Edgar Allan Poe
#38. During the Middle Ages they understood that words accompanied by imagery are much more memorable. By making the margins of a book colorful and beautiful, illuminations help make the text unforgettable. It's unfortunate that we've lost the art of illumination.
Joshua Foer
#39. First follow Nature, and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same:
Unerring nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of art.
Alexander Pope
#40. We all have a unique art, our personal passion that serves as a vessel through which our souls can speak. True happiness is found by filling it, and purpose is fulfilled by pouring it out.
Cristen Rodgers
#41. I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great.
Carl Sagan
#42. Poetry gets to be the poetry of life by successfully becoming first the poetry of poetry.
John Hollander
#43. Being a systematic theologian allows me to indulge all my interests - in literature, film, art, music - by relating them all to God.
Kevin Vanhoozer
#44. What is the intersection between technology, art and science? Curiosity and wonder, because it drives us to explore, because we're surrounded by things we can't see.
Louie Schwartzberg
#45. Art is art when it is appreciated by someone.
Isao Tomita
#46. By translating their inner turmoil or understanding into art, artists challenge the accepted notions of reality and create new ones.
Wes Nisker
#47. In art we do not make things any simpler by making simpler things. Reduction does not yield certainty, but something like its opposite, which is ambiguity and multi-valence.
Kirk Varnedoe
#48. One of the things about the arts that is so important is that in the arts you discover the only way to learn how to do it is by doing it. You can't write by reading a book about it. The only way to learn how to write a book is to sit down and try to write a book
David McCullough
#49. According to an ancient and common tradition in the kingdom of Great Britain, this king did not die, but was transformed into a raven by the art of enchantment and, in the course of time, he shall return to rule again and regain his kingdom and his scepter.
Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra
#50. The harder you work, the more you produce, the more you create, the more you will be rejected. By people who never created shit.
Jonathan Heatt
#51. That is the way of science and art, it is beloved by your societies and criminalised by your cultures.
Steve Merrick
#53. I wish to be of service to the artists of our own day, by showing them how a small beginning leads to the highest elevation, and how from so noble a situation it is possible to fall to utmost ruin, and consequently, how these arts resemble nature as shown in our human bodies.
Giorgio Vasari
#54. All the great captains have performed vast achievements by conforming with the rules of art
by adjusting efforts to obstacles.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#55. Then the imitative poet who aims at being popular is not by nature made, nor is his art intended, to please or to affect the rational principle in the soul; but he will prefer the passionate and fitful temper, which is easily imitated? Clearly. And
Plato
#56. I don't want money to ever drive my career. I want my career to be driven by what I want to do in art.
Ansel Elgort
#57. Art grabs people by their eyeballs, it seduces them ... art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself.
Eric Drooker
#58. Quill: An instrument of torture yielded by a goose and commonly weilded by as ass.
Ambrose Bierce
#59. The awesome thing about lettering - which is different from many forms of art - is that you can actually see your mistakes. There are sophomore mistakes that people do at the beginning that you spot everywhere. For example, a lot of people make 'W's by turning 'M's upside down.
Jessica Hische
#60. The "happening" operates by creating an asymmetrical network of surprises, without climax or consummation, this is the alogism of dreams rather than the logic of most art.
Susan Sontag
#61. What cultural revolutionaries do not seem to grasp is that, far from being a grass-roots art form that has been taken over by businessmen, rock itself comes from the commercial exploitation of the blues.
Ellen Willis
#62. I never can hear a crowd of people singing and gesticulating, all together, at an Italian opera, without fancying myself at Athens, listening to that particular tragedy, by Sophocles, in which he introduces a full chorus of turkeys, who set about bewailing the death of Meleager.
Edgar Allan Poe
#63. The creation of a work of art must of necessity, as a result of entering into the specific dimensions of pictorial art, be accompanied by distortion of the natural form. For, therein is nature reborn.
Paul Klee
#64. Digital forms are best illuminated by cultural criticism, which uses the tools of art and literary theory to make sense of the Internet's glorious illusion: that the Internet is life. Because
Virginia Heffernan
#65. That which takes effect by chance is not an art.
Seneca.
#66. Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art - the finest of all, perhaps - truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.
Victor Hugo
#67. The concealment of art by the actor is as great a mark of genius as it is in the painter.
Francois Delsarte
#68. Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.
D.W. Winnicott
#69. A movie is just like a work of art or a book or a piece of music. The intent of its maker is one thing, but its interpretation by an audience is something else. I don't stop at what the filmmaker wanted to do.
Wesley Morris
#72. Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.
William Morris
#73. Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.
Thomas Hardy
#74. Artistic temperament is like a king with vigor and unlimited opportunity. You shake the structure to pieces by playing with it.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#75. I heard someone say he [Carl Sandburg] was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.
Robert Frost
#76. There have been countless changes in the long history of art. The most significant have been brought about by the genius of a single artist.
Thomas Hoving
#77. The trees and shrubs rear white arms to the sky on every side; and where were walls and fences, we see forms stretching in frolic gambols across the dusky landscape, as if Nature had strewn her fresh designs over the fields by night as models for man's art.
Henry David Thoreau
#78. Life is a piece of art drawn by love on the canvas of hope with the colors of desires, wants, and needs.
Debasish Mridha
#79. Ideas, which grow up within the imagination and appear so lovely to it and of a value beyond whatever men call valuable, are exposed to be shattered and annihilated by contact with the practical.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
#80. On certain occasions art can shake very ordinary spirits, and whole worlds can be revealed by its clumsiest interpreters.
Gustave Flaubert
#81. Different lifestory but with a same lovestory
They mey once by serendipity
Smiled at each other but totally stranger
Patrick Cruz
#82. The man who arrives at the doors of artistic creation with none of the madness of the Muses would be convinced that technical ability alone was enough to make an artist ... what that man creates by means of reason will pale before the art of inspired beings.
Plato
#83. An art school is generated only by the intensity and heat of a common pressure.
William Lethaby
#84. I believe people can have a profound experience by being surrounded by something beautiful - that's what I aim for. My sculpture is about the way you feel when you're standing under it and inside it. It's experiential art.
Janet Echelman
#85. The weather-cock on the church spire, though made of iron, would soon be broken by the storm-wind if it did not understand the noble art of turning to every wind.
Heinrich Heine
#86. The thing about architecture is that it's an art [you] simply learn more by doing more. It's one of those things that is really not an art about thinking, but doing. So in a way, what it has done is greatly intensify the way that I build.
David Adjaye
#87. Kitsch is art that follows established rules in a time when all rules in art are put into question by each artist.
Harold Rosenberg
#88. I did this Super-8 film at art school called 'Tissues,' this black comedy about a family whose father has been arrested for child molestation. I was absolutely thrilled by every inch of it, and would throw my projector in the back of my car and show it to anybody who would watch it.
Jane Campion
#89. Degas was obsessed by the art of classical ballet, because to him it said something about the human condition. He was not a balletomane looking for an alternative world to escape into. Dance offered him a display in which he could find, after much searching, certain human secrets.
John Berger
#90. There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
Flannery O'Connor
#91. The truth of art consists in its power to break the monopoly that those in power exercise by defining what is real.
Denis Donoghue
#92. Modesty is the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it.
Oliver Herford
#93. With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.
Sydney Pollack
#94. And style, by the way, is a very important thing. It is like your signature, your handwriting or it is something that you develop that is your way of presenting yourself and also your way of looking at what art - of how to make art.
Robert Barry
#95. Doubt is only removed by action. If you're not working then that's where doubt comes in.
Conor McGregor
#96. But as long as you're creating the art you want to create, if people start liking you, you shouldn't have to apologize. You want your stuff to be heard by as many people as possible.
Nate Ruess
#97. Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.
Jean Cocteau
#98. Science and art, or by the same token, poetry and prose differ from one another like a journey and an excursion. The purpose of the journey is its goal, the purpose of an excursion is the process.
Franz Grillparzer
#99. To be able to endure odium is the first art to be learned by those who aspire to power.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
#100. They decided to establish a museum of modern art where works by contemporary artists would be shown. Mother was viewed as a very progressive person, and not everybody liked the paintings she bought.
David Rockefeller
