Top 100 Art Eye Quotes
#1. The Mona Lisa, the Mona Lisa....Leonardo had eye trouble....Art couldn't explain it....But now we're safe, since science can explain it. Maybe Milton wrote Paradise Lost because he was blind? And Beethoven wrote the Ninth Symphony because he was deaf...
William Gaddis
#2. I am the eye that beholds ... And I am the dreamer that paints the stars in the night sky ... For I am the one they call artist, and you call Love.
Solange Nicole
#3. Reading is the strangest art. Your eye takes a shape, turns it into music, then story, then spirit, so a curl of ink laid long ago by a sliver of reed can become, a thousand years later, your own breath.
Keith Miller
#4. I like the sense of the road passing my eyes. It's always a fascinating experience to come into a new city ... the sense of the people changing, the food changing, everything changing, the art.
Greg Lake
#5. Art furnishes us with eyes and hands and above all the good conscience to be able to turn ourselves into such a phenomenon.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#6. I never buy a piece of art. I don't see the point in buying something because I know my eyes will get bored of it eventually.
Karl Pilkington
#7. You know, I often thought that the gangster and the artist are the same in the eyes of the masses. They're admired and hero-worshipped but there is always present underlying desire to see them destroyed at the peak of their glory.
Stanley Kubrick
#8. The great art in writing advertisements is the finding out of a proper method to catch the reader's eye; without which, a good thing may pass over unobserved, or lost among commissions of bankrupt.
Joseph Addison
#9. In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs.
Henri Bergson
#10. Art is a weapon that penetrates the eyes, the ears, the deepest and subtlest human feelings.
David Alfaro Siqueiros
#11. I think having a dispassionate eye is a good way of making art. When you don't know the structures of a place, you are unencumbered.
Rory Kinnear
#12. The eye is complicated. It mixes the colors [it sees] for you ... The painter must unmix them and lay them on again shade by shade, and then the eye of the beholder takes over and mixes them again.
Elizabeth Borton De Trevino
#13. Love sharpens the eye, the ear, the touch; it quickens the feet, it steadies the hand, it arms against the wet and the cold.
What we love to do, that we do well.
To know is not all; it is only half.
To love is the other half
John Burroughs
#14. Your most important gear is your eye, heart and soul.
Marius Vieth
#15. 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
#16. That horrible moment of suspense when the artist shows one of his creations to strange eyes for the first time.
Irving Stone
#17. Art first of all is optical. That's where the material of our art is: in what our eyes think.
Paul Cezanne
#18. Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.
Alex Grey
#19. But sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot
Robert Lowell
#20. The experience of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. The artist's relation to the object of beauty, how the art makes that happen, is a whole other subject. Beauty is an event. Beauty is something that happens. There is no such thing as a beautiful object or a beautiful woman.
Peter Schjeldahl
#22. I had a growing feeling that most of the best art of the world in painting and sculpture had been done, and that this newest form [photography] was more related to the progress and tempo of modern science of the eye.
Paul Outerbridge
#23. But now the train had finally begun to move, and Albie had switched the fearless truth-telling eye of his camera lens from his untied laces to the walls of the tunnels under east London, because you can never have enough pictures of dirty concrete.
David Nicholls
#24. Great art is in the eye of the beholder, but great football is in the record books.
Scott Sigler
#25. When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.
Agnes Martin
#26. But the eyes, though they are no sailors, will never be satisfied with any model, however fashionable, which does not answer all the requisitions of art.
Henry David Thoreau
#27. Maybe that's where the new art comes in - to somehow have your eye on the marketplace and harness your art to come up with something you can be proud of creatively.
Jonathan Demme
#28. Lord Byron is an exceedingly interesting person, and as such is it not to be regretted that he is a slave to the vilest and most vulgar prejudices, and as mad as the winds?
There have been many definitions of beauty in art. What is it? Beauty is what the untrained eyes consider abominable.
Edmond De Goncourt
#29. I was so absolutely riveted, I felt I was looking into the eyes of the artist. Art just closed the gap of time and space. The 16th century became as real to me as the 20th. It was something magical.
Betty Churcher
#30. Happy the man ... with a natural gift
for practising the right one [art] from the start
poetry, say, or fishing; whose nights are dreamless;
whose deep-sunk panoramas rise and pass
like daylight through the rod's eye or the nib's eye.
Seamus Heaney
#31. Redemption in Christ should give the artistically gifted not only a new orientation and a new sense of purpose, but also a new vision of reality, seeing the world through the eyes of faith, looking at the human condition through the eyes of Christ.
John Walford
#33. In my eyes, making art is very often about something that you don't know.
Lawrence Weiner
#34. I'm generally not a fan of didactic art because it papers over many of the hard experiences about war or anything else in life. I wanted to explore various aspects of the experience without an eye towards delivering any particular message.
Phil Klay
#35. 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
#36. [in the true mad north] of introspection,
where 'falcons of the inner eye'
dive and die, glimpsing in their
dying fall, all life's memory of existence.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
#37. Art addresses itself to the mind, and not to the eyes. It has always been considered in this way by primitive peoples, and they are right.
Jean Dubuffet
#38. The only way art lives is through the experience of the observer. The reality of art begins with the eyes of the beholder, through imagination, invention and confrontation.
Keith Haring
#39. That's not precisely what I had in mind.
Jamie, I had found out by accident a few days previously, had never mastered the art of winking one eye. Instead, he blinked solemnly, like a large red owl.
Diana Gabaldon
#40. Reviewers, critics, guest editors... Such people may have an eye for literary conventions and contrivances, allusions and innovations on the art. But what are their tastes based on? Do they tend to choose work that most resembles theirs?
Amy Tan
#41. I'm inspired by looking at art, by looking at precedent. Looking is what you have to do if you want to make things, so you develop a critical eye.
Annabelle Selldorf
#42. If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.
Honore De Balzac
#43. Seeing is an experience. People, not their eyes, see. There is more to seeing than meets the eyeball.
Norwood Russell Hanson
#44. Your art is so abstract that I can only see it through my mind's eye and touch it through my heart.
Debasish Mridha
#45. It is to Titian we must turn our eyes to find excellence with regard to color, and light and shade, in the highest degree. He was both the first and the greatest master of this art. By a few strokes he knew how to mark the general image and character of whatever object he attempted ...
Joshua Reynolds
#46. When I turn the lights out, when I close my eyes, reality overcomes me, I'm living a lie.
Avril Lavigne
#47. Much Madness is Divinest Sense, to a Discerning Eye ...
Emily Dickinson
#48. Wonderful craftsmanship, Simon decided with the expert eye of one who had played enough computer games to know art when he saw it.
Sorin Suciu
#49. If for us culture means museum and library and open house and art gallery, for them it meant the activities and amenities of everyday life ... The rift is ... between "folk" culture, where the unschooled can be wise, and print culture, which enslaved the other senses to the eye.
Nick Joaquin
#50. Experiment - exercising to see the result. We planned Europa not as an experiment in this sense but as a work of art. Yet The Eye and the Ear was done as a consciously designed experiment. Not every avant-garde dealt with experiments and not every experiment equalled avant-garde.
Stefan Themerson
#51. O, how much simpler things would be If eyes could paint or brush could see.
Robert Breault
#52. Thou art my life, my love, my heart,
The very eyes of me:
And hast command of every part
To live and die for thee.
Robert Herrick
#53. Shutting one's eyes is an art, my dear. I suppose there's no use trying to make you see that - but that's the only way one can stay married.
Zoe Akins
#54. The highest exercise of imagination is not to devise what has no existence, but rather to perceive what really exists, though unseen by the outward eye-not creation, but insight.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#55. Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain.
Childe Hassam
#56. We live under a prince who is an enemy to fraud, a prince whose eyes penetrate into the heart, and whom all the art of impostors can't deceive.
Moliere
#57. Art must not stop at the level of pleasing eyes.
Li Shan
#58. Oh, my soul! why art thou so often disquieted within thee? How is it that thou hast so little faith? Wilt thou never learn that Jesus has even the least of His little boats always under His watchful eye, and all the winds and the waves obey Him?
Theodore L. Cuyler
#59. A tattoo is a true poetic creation, and is always more than meets the eye. As a tattoo is grounded on living skin, so its essence emotes a poignancy unique to the mortal human condition.
V. Vale
#60. Ah yes, you like to cook, don't you?
well, i used to. you need real dedication. fresh ingredients, a discerning palate, an eye for presentation. it's not a modern art. good cooking has hardly evolved since the nineteenth century.
Haruki Murakami
#61. O Innocence, with laughing eyes! Thou art a cherub from the skies, A wanderer from heaven.
Harvey Rice
#62. Wrap thyself in the decent veil that the arts or the graces weave for thee, O human nature! It is only the statue of marble whose nakedness the eye can behold without shame and offence!
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#63. 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
#64. We are not moving towards some kind of goal. We are at the goal, and it is changing with us. If art has any purpose, it is to open our eyes to that fact.
Antony Gormley
#65. I love art that haunts me, that stays with me, that is left embedded in my mind. I don't really think there is any use for owning or collecting art; it is more about remembering and preserving it in the minds eye and allowing it into your cultural DNA.
Doug Aitken
#66. Only the four corners of the background remained. It was terribly difficult to fix my eyes on all of them at the same time. My experience was that the most difficult thing of all in art is painting in all four corners at the same time.
Arnulf Rainer
#67. No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it.
Frank Stella
#68. It is said that my art has some typically Nordic features: the curving lines, the convolutions, the magical masks and staring eyes that appear in myths and folk art. This may be. My interest in the dynamics of Jugend style probably also comes into it.
Asger Jorn
#69. I remain detached and distant, but it is under my eyes and my orders that the work of art must create itself. Then, when the creation starts, I stand there, present at the ceremony, immaculate, calm, relaxed ... ready to welcome the work of art that is coming into existence in the tangible world.
Yves Klein
#70. Abstract art is a fundamental distrust of the theory of reality concocted by the eyes.
Robert Breault
#71. When it comes to art, buy with your eyes, not your ears. I tried very hard not to 'decorate' with art. Art should be reflective of your personality and what's going on in your head-not reflective of the colors of a sofa.
Jason Pomeranc
#72. Reason! how many eyes hast thou to see evils, and how dim, nay, blind, thou art in preventing them.
Philip Sidney
#73. One eye sees, the other feels.
Paul Klee
#74. At different moments you see with different eyes. You see differently in the morning than you do in the evening. In addition, how you see is also dependent on your emotional state. Because of this, a motif can be seen in many different ways, and this is what makes art interesting.
Edvard Munch
#75. 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
#76. Art that imposes conditions - human or otherwise - on the receiver for its appreciation in my eyes constitutes aesthetic fascism.
Lawrence Weiner
#77. The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticellis as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.
Clive Barker
#79. In whatever one does there must be a relationship between the eye and the heart.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
#80. The stuff of thought is the seed of the artist. Dreams form the bristles of the artist's brush. As the eye functions as the brain's sentry, I communicate my innermost perceptions through the art, my worldview.
Arshile Gorky
#82. When I close my eyes, my imagination roams free. In the same way I want to create spaces for video art that rethink the very nature of the medium itself. I want to discover new ways of configuring the world, both the world outside and the world within
Pipilotti Rist
#83. Transforms old print To zigzag manuscript, and cheats the eyes Of gallery critics by a thousand arts.
William Cowper
#84. I believe in walking out of a museum before the paintings you've seen begin to run together. How else can you carry anything away with you in your mind's eye?
Elizabeth Kostova
#85. The arts are part of a nation's identity, they are part of a nation's soul and when we look at a country from the eyes of people overseas they are part of a nations branding in the world as it were.
George Brandis
#86. I worked with someone else's photos; I cropped them in whatever way I wanted and put words on top of them. I knew how to do it with my eyes closed. Why couldn't that be my art?
Barbara Kruger
#87. With a leer of mingled sweetness and slyness; with one eye on the future, one on the bride, and an arch expression in her face, partly spiritual, partly spirituous, and wholly professional and peculiar to her art; Mrs Gamp rummaged in her pocket again [ ... ]
Charles Dickens
#88. I like "Julie Gold's song "From a Distance". Her song reminds me of the world as seen through an observer's eye. Seen from a distance, we are people in the same band playing music for everyone. We are artists who play the most beautiful instruments in the world - life.
Ilchi Lee
#89. When contemplating a work of art it is possible to perceive if it has been created according to the eye or to the spirit, in other words, if it projects three-dimensional reality or spiritual n-dimensionality.
Theo Van Doesburg
#91. The exercise of criticism always destroys for a time our sensibility to beauty by leading us to regard the work in relation to certain laws of construction. The eye turns from the charms of nature to fix itself upon the servile dexterity of art.
Sir Archibald Alison, 2nd Baronet
#92. Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.
Oscar Wilde
#93. And I saw Australia anew through her eyes. And I realised what a tremendously thrilling country it was. And ever since then I have been coming back regularly.
Robert Helpmann
#94. The gilding holds the eye just long enough to let God enter the soul. The two-dimensional image does not require interpretation, and therefore doesn't stand between you and God the way it does in three-dimensional western art.
Robert C. Yeager
#95. And when had a critical eye ever helped me, really? Nobody likes the girl who points out all the inherent sexism on The Bachelor. But people are charmed byt the girl kvelling about nail art, boba tea, and the homeopathic benefits of ayahuasca.
Mindy Kaling
#96. My art history papers were really politics. They were about the manifestation of culture through the eye of political events. So there was always that refusal to settle in one place, or one discipline or medium.
Roselee Goldberg
#97. I understand abstract art as an attempt to feed imagination with a world built through the basic sensations of the eyes.
Jean Helion
#98. Everybody's wearing a disguise, to hide what they've got left behind their eyes.
Bob Dylan
#99. Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.
John Lubbock
#100. He tried to make each painting capture that gently fuzzed qualit the camera gave everything, as if someone had patted away a top layer of clarity and left behind something kinder than the eye alone would see.
Hanya Yanagihara
