Top 100 Art Great Quotes
#1. Painting, which is essentially a rhythmic harmony of coloured spaces. Realism was the death of art. Great art should come from the harmony of two lines.
Arthur Wesley Dow
#2. There are tons of people who have made great music, great art, great whatever, but you don't know about them until the people lift you to a certain height so that you could even be visible and get any kind of recognition.
Pharrell Williams
#3. I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.
Gerhard Richter
#5. Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self.
Madeleine L'Engle
#6. To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.
Madeleine L'Engle
#7. 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
#8. Like any great art, the culture of hip-hop has changed with the times. With the state of technology, music is more accessible and freely exchanged. For hip-hop to grow while keeping a sense of integrity, the essence of the culture has to be handed down and respected like any high form of art.
One9
#9. My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her.
Jacob Rothschild
#10. Once A. K. Coomaraswamy, the great twentieth-century Indian expert on traditional metaphysics and art, said that in modern society the artist is a special kind of person, while in traditional society every person is a special kind of artist.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr
#11. 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
#12. Good art and a good life answers questions. Great art and a great life asks questions.
Richard Blanco
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. There is no prosperity, trade, art, city, or great material wealth of any kind, but if you trace it home, you will find it rooted in a thought of some individual man.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#16. They are the best physicians, who being great in learning most incline to the traditions of experience, or being distinguished in practice do not reflect the methods and generalities of art.
Francis Bacon
#18. Creative output, you know, is just pain. I'm going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.
Kanye West
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I hope you'll understand that I am not quoting those great words lightly. I do mean it. Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#22. 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
#23. The immortality of great art seems bound up with the inevitable loss of its original surface meaning and its rebirth in the spirit of every new age.
Anton Ehrenzweig
#24. Have the courage to analyze great emotions to create characters who shall be lofty and true. The whole art of the analytical novel lies there.
Paul Bourget
#25. Hong Kong is a nice playground for my street pieces as the architecture is very different from my home city. It's also a great opportunity to take place in a dynamic city of the global art scene.
Invader
#26. To great sections of the Church the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the "program." This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us.
A.W. Tozer
#27. 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
#28. We will be happy if we can get around to the idea that art is not an outside and extra thing; that it is a natural outcome of a state of being; that the state of being is the important thing; that a man can be a carpenter and be a great man.
Robert Henri
#29. Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.
Francois Truffaut
#30. The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.
Oscar Wilde
#31. 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
#32. Artists must be men of wit, consciously or unconsciously philosophers; read, study and think a great deal of life ...
Robert Henri
#33. 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
#34. I've always wanted to do things differently, and if one person or ten people are doing the same, then I want to do it differently. I love to travel, I love art, I love fashion. I love going to great restaurants and trying different things. Different cultures are inspiring to me.
Molly Sims
#35. O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives.
Jim Morrison
#36. The great thing that guys like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and the Google guys have in common is they treat their technology like it's art, and I suppose in the hands of virtuosos like them, it is.
Harvey Weinstein
#37. Recently, the Germans have developed a tendency to prefer the so-called first (youthful) style of great artists to their mature works. Could it be that they do not realize that their aesthetic criteria, generally speaking, are juvenile?
Franz Grillparzer
#38. I suppose it's true that most great television, literature, and other forms of high art (and basic cable) benefit from a little hindsight. 'M.A.S.H.' comes to mind. So does 'The Iliad.'
Kevin Bleyer
#39. It's very true that an artist who networks well will have better opportunities than one who doesn't network well. But great networking skills without great art won't change art history.
Mark Kostabi
#40. I'm also inspired by great art and people who create and contribute rather than destroy.
Raul Castillo
#41. Working in the arts, you see people who come from terrible circumstances and who, for whatever reason, have incredible talent. But of course, with that great talent comes some guilt because, if you come from circumstances that don't encourage it, it can be really confusing.
Jesse Eisenberg
#42. There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship.
Bertrand Russell
#43. Hatchery fish have the same colours, but they always seem muted like bad reproductions of great art.
Bill Barich
#44. An important document of the paper of record at a crucial, make-or-break juncture in its long, glorious history, and a love letter to the dying art form that is the great American newspaper.
Nathan Rabin
#45. Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.
Janet Flanner
#46. I did work at Christie's for a couple of weeks, getting ready for 'The Devil Wears Prada,' getting people coffee and doing whatever they needed around the office. It was amazing. I got to see some wonderful art, and everybody was really nice. It was great.
Anne Hathaway
#47. Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.
Henry David Thoreau
#48. All great art is an imperfect, halting attempt to catch up upon life.
John Edgar Park
#49. People think a big camera and big lighting will make art, and I want to break that rule. If you have a great concept, it can be art.
Nikki S. Lee
#50. I wanted to be an artist. I was studying art. I wanted to be a great painter. When I went into the Navy, there wasn't much to draw at sea. So I began writing, and I began reading a lot.
Evan Hunter
#51. To make great art, you had to expose your soul, and some things should be left safely in the dark.
Patricia Briggs
#52. Great art is difficult," Caleb said. After a few moments, he said, "But I don't understand why it has to be so difficult sometimes.
Kevin Wilson
#53. 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
#54. Movies have been doing so much of the same thing - in slightly different ways - for so long that few of the possibilities of this great hybrid art have yet been explored.
Pauline Kael
#55. 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
#56. Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration ... tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils
Francis Bacon
#57. What is great about art and artists is that we get to ask the questions, even though we may never know the answers.
Dennis Quaid
#58. The great art of governing consists in not letting men grow old in their jobs.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#59. I moved to Chicago and began attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The students and teachers I met in Chicago were politically active and also passionate about the same things that I was interested in. It was a great match for me.
Stephen Beal
#61. It is not enough merely possess virtue, as if it were an art; it should be practiced.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
#63. I was lucky to have my wife as the art director, and it turned out to be quite something - a great success. I'm very proud of it.
Helmut Newton
#64. If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.
Jasper Fforde
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. We feel more emotion ... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.
Chris Marker
#68. The writing of headline is one of the great journalistic arts. They either conceal or reveal am interest
Claude C. Hopkins
#69. If thou art rich, then show the greatness of thy fortune; or what is better, the greatness of thy soul, in the meekness of thy conversation; condescend to men of low estate, support the distressed, and patronize the neglected. Be great.
Laurence Sterne
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. Movies are collaborative, and that's part of what makes it a great experience. They're different from a lot of other art forms, but also it makes it seem like when you see the final product, you go, 'I wouldn't have done that. I wouldn't have done this.'
Casey Affleck
#73. For Art alone is great:
The bust survives the state,
The crown the potentate.
Theophile Gautier
#74. Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish.
Arne Glimcher
#75. I don't think we live in those times when great art comes out of great adversity.
Noel Gallagher
#77. It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in it's place is a work extremely troublesome.
Plutarch
#78. 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
#79. I've worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don't like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art.
Serj Tankian
#80. In this kind of super-capitalistic society, everything is turned into money. And one of the great things about art is it isn't worth anything. It's absolutely free. It's going to get made no matter what.
Brice Marden
#81. Real-life discussions involve a great many bores and boors who have never learned that the art of conversation demands listening as well as talking.
Susan Jacoby
#82. Everybody has his own great ideas about what my art should be. But I can do whatever I like and there aren't many constraints to the way I work, whether I'm using a brush with ink or paint.
Raymond Pettibon
#83. I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.
William Shakespeare
#84. Escape from the black widow spider is a miracle as great as art. what a web she can weave slowly drawing you to her she'll embrace you then when she's satisfied she'll kill you still in her embrace and suck the blood from you.
Charles Bukowski
#85. The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable.
H.L. Mencken
#86. So the audience, at times, lets us know actually what is so special about the show that we can't even necessarily design or predict. Which is great. That's what you want art to be. You want it to be alive and to actually have a life in the way it's viewed.
Steve Zissis
#87. Great art is created only through diligent and painstaking effort to perfect and polish oneself.
Daisaku Ikeda
#88. Unfortunately, half the boats were lost in a great storm at sea, and many members of the six boats that did make it to their destinations safely, were later killed by the very native people to whom they sought to transmit their knowledge of the Atlantean sciences, arts and metaphysics.
Frederick Lenz
#89. There's an audience for all kinds of great art.
Robin Thicke
#90. We had forgotten the art of using silence to convey emotions in our films and that's what you seem to have mastered. You've used silence to great advantage in the film. It's brilliant.
Amitabh Bachchan
#91. 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
#92. Life is never beautiful, but only the pictures of life are so in the transfiguring mirror of art or poetry; especially in youth, when we do not yet know it. Many a youth would receive great peace of mind if one could assist him to this knowledge.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#93. Architecture isman'sgreat sense of himself embodied in a world of his own making. It may rise as high in quality only as its source because great art isgreat life.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#94. A great friendship was like a great work of art, he thought. It took time and attention, and a spark of something that was impossible to describe. It was a happy, lucky accident, finding some kindred part of yourself in a total stranger. pg. 287
Elise Broach
#95. The reader's feedback is the muse for great written works of art.
Sarah Scott
#96. As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.
Ruth Benedict
#97. Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.
George Jean Nathan
#98. Most of the books that I've adapted I'm doing because I love the book and I feel like it's a great work of art in itself, and when it's a great book I feel as a director or a writer that I have a responsibility to rise to the level of the original. It makes me try to reach higher.
James Franco
#99. but thou art a God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and forsookest them not.
Anonymous
#100. As much as we'd like to believe that our work is great and that we're infallible, we're not. Hollywood movies are made for the audience. These are not small European art films we're making.
Harold Ramis
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