Top 100 Art Is Art Quotes
#1. I remember saying to myself, those things are very, very important to hear, but there must be another way to say them so that they will truly be heard. I mean, that's what art is. Art is about being provocative; art is also about beauty and if you leave the latter out, the former doesn't matter.
Nikky Finney
#2. Politics is politics; art is art. If you play a political role, you have to stop being an artist.
Youssou N'Dour
#3. We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.
Billy Al Bengston
#4. Art is art when it is appreciated by someone.
Isao Tomita
#5. Music is an emotional experience, and that is what imprints itself on the soul. And I think for me, any great art is art which communicates human emotion.
Greg Lake
#6. I feel this society somewhere has lost its sense of what art is. Art is expression. In expression, you need 100% full freedom and our freedom to express our art is seriously being fucked with. Fuck, the word 'fuck' has many connotations as does the word 'art'.
Kurt Cobain
#7. Well, art is art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water! And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now, uh ... now you tell me what you know.
Groucho Marx
#8. Art is art and life is life, but to live life artistically; that is the art of life
Peter Altenberg
#10. Good art is art that allows you to enter it from a variety of angles and to emerge with a variety of views.
Mary Schmich
#11. When I was in my studio I didn't give a damn what sex I was ... I thought art is art.
Alice Neel
#13. I think that's what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.
Misha Glouberman
#14. Art is art, nature is nature, you cannot improve upon it ... Pictures should be inspired by nature, but made in the soul of the artist. It is the soul of the individual that counts.
Emily Carr
#15. Art is art. You can take it or leave it. Liking it or not liking it does not make you a better person, and who you like or dislike results in the same thing.
Trent Zelazny
#16. Art is Art. Everything else is everything else.
Ad Reinhardt
#18. Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
Fernando Pessoa
#19. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.
Havelock Ellis
#20. Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
Gregory Bateson
#21. 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
#22. Art is not a mirror held up to society but a hammer with which to shape it.
Bertolt Brecht
#23. The word "art" does not designate the concept of a mere eventuality; it is a concept of rank.
To dwell is to garden.
Martin Heidegger
#24. Melodrama is one of the most stunning art forms. These are stories where the emotions are big, and the situations are big, and the artists believe in the situation dramatically. There's no irony or distance.
James Gray
#25. Art inspires, produces an unwillingness to settle for what we have and a desire for something better. It is the product and producer of creative activity, change; it is essential for continuous development.
Russell L. Ackoff
#27. The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water.
Stendhal
#28. If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.
Oscar Wilde
#29. A city's art must give the impression that art is as indispensable a thing as water, or food.
Pier Giorgio Di Cicco
#30. Music is one of the highest art forms there is. It can define a life, change a life, or even safe a life, in just three short minutes.
Alyson Noel
#31. Art is one step from the visibly known toward the unknown. MS-71
Kahlil Gibran
#32. 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
#33. People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were.
Edward R. Murrow
#34. My art is the result of a deeply personal, infinitely complex, and still essentially mysterious, exploration of experience. No words will ever touch it.
George Brecht
#35. Art is the only place you can do what you like. That's freedom.
Paula Rego
#36. The chief art of learning, as Locke has observed, is to attempt but little at a time. The widest excursions of the mind are made by short flights frequently repeated; the most lofty fabrics of science are formed by the continued accumulation of single propositions.
Samuel Johnson
#37. Ah! What avails the classic bent
And what the cultured word,
Against the undoctored incident
That actually occurred?
And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme-
When Nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time?
Rudyard Kipling
#38. In a nation that has developed to a high art advertising, the creator who refuses to advertise himself is immediately suspected of having no product worth selling.
Gore Vidal
#39. I mean, the type of art that I enjoy is art that - I enjoy a very broad spectrum, but I especially like art that leaves me a little confused and uncertain as to what just happened.
Reggie Watts
#40. When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.
John Cage
#41. War is the art of killing each other brutally, diplomacy is the art of killing each other softly.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#42. Criticizing is easy, art is difficult.
Bill Cosby
#43. Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness.
Bryant H. McGill
#44. Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.
Derek Walcott
#45. I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something more than sit on its ass in a museum.
Claes Oldenburg
#46. Seek the strongest color effect possible ... the content is of no importance.
Henri Matisse
#47. Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.
Edmund Burke
#48. Diplomacy is the art of telling plain truths without giving offense.
Winston Churchill
#49. The meeting of science and art is definitely interesting for the 21st century, and I think to use scientific expertise and knowledge to preserve an artistic statement is very interesting. It takes things a step further.
Marc Quinn
#50. Hard information on the quantity of bogus art sold is difficult to come by, in part because fraud, when discovered by dealers and auction houses, is usually kept secret to boost public confidence in the art market.
Peter Landesman
#52. The difference between extras and audience members is that audience members don't get chairs. Audience members are the daylaborers of the industry. When it's sunny, we stand in the sun. When it's cold, we stand in the cold.
J. Richard Singleton
#53. The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.
Oscar Wilde
#54. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Morality, like art, means drawing a line somewhere." The question is: where is the line?
Dan Ariely
#55. I believe the cinema is one of our principal forms of art. It is an incredibly powerful way to tell uplifting stories that can move people to cry with joy and inspire them to reach for the stars.
Wes Craven
#56. Hard and dry, a chickpea is inedible.
Hard and dry, a heart is unlovable.
Presoak it in dance, music and art.
Khang Kijarro Nguyen
#57. One of the most unnecessary and most dangerous art of people is to create big tragedies from little things!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#58. Architecture is the king or queen of the arts,
Gaetano Pesce
#60. 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
#61. All the arts are based on the senses. What they do for the person who practices them, and also the persons interested in them, is make that particular sense more active and more acute.
Henry Moore
#62. There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.
Mao Zedong
#63. And if we can imagine the art of fiction come alive and standing in our midst, she would undoubtedly bid us break her and bully her, as well as honour and love her, for so her youth is renewed and her sovereignty assured.
Virginia Woolf
#64. You called me poet-priest - I am ... devoted to my art, faithful to you ... or, is the other way around? ...
John Geddes
#65. Art is the only power capable of destroying the internet.
Terence Koh
#66. Contemporary novels can have a fleeting existence within the current multiplication of medias and the technological rapidity with which art is delivered and consumed. A cultural lacuna has opened, one that needs arresting.
Tom Cardamone
#67. They say Princes learn no art truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as his groom.
Ben Jonson
#68. Art is not a copy of the real world; one of the damn things is enough.
Virginia Woolf
#69. There is no politically neutral art.
Bell Hooks
#70. Movie acting may not have a certain kind of glory as true art, but it is damn hard work.
William Holden
#71. In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.
Alberto Manguel
#72. Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#73. That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, "Thou art my refuge.
George MacDonald
#74. So I find every pleasant spot In which we two were wont to meet, The field, the chamber, and the street, For all is dark where thou art not
Alfred Lord Tennyson
#75. The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents the true reality, not external aspects.
Aristotle.
#76. God is desperately looking for those he could send to the world of art and culture, to rule the place for him.
Sunday Adelaja
#77. Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.
Ralph Bakshi
#78. Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
Pablo Picasso
#79. Advocating through art is known as propaganda. You should look up the name Goebbels.
Glenn Beck
#80. Suffering is the price of being alive, and it is music and singing and art that has helped me live through some of the most difficult things that have happened to me.
Judy Collins
#81. DJ-ing itself is not just about playing songs. The art of DJ-ing is presenting new songs to the crowd that they haven't heard before and creating a party vibe that's different than just listening to anybody's playlist. It's the only way to truly be big and respected in your craft.
TyDi
#82. In art, vitality is the chaotic initial state; beauty is the cosmic final state.
Chairil Anwar
#83. When the higher officers are angry and insubordinate, and on meeting the enemy give battle on their own account from a feeling of resentment, before the commander-in-chief can tell whether or not he is in a position to fight, the result is ruin.
Sun Tzu
#84. The novel is always pop art, and the novel is always dying. That's the only way it stays alive. It does really die. I've been thinking about that a lot.
Leslie Fiedler
#85. One of the things that's good for me is that I can go from one art form to another.
Rebecca Miller
#86. Judging is acting on a limited knowledge. Learn the art of observing without evaluating.
Pushpa Rana
#88. At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.
Joyce Carol Oates
#89. While most people in the arts think they have to be constantly looking forward to be edgy and creative ... the real secret of creativity is to go back and remember.
Twyla Tharp
#90. Your life is the manifestation of your dream; it is an art. You can change your life anytime if you aren't enjoying the dream.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
#91. Art is prayer - not the vulgarized notations handed down to us in the scriptures, but a fresh vital discovery of one's own special presence in the world.
Joseph C Zinker
#92. I think art is a very important weapon to achieve human freedom
Ai Weiwei
#93. The problem with our art form: it's so ephemeral, and catching performances can be so difficult ... the important thing is what happens at the moment of performance, for the people who made the effort to be there: it lives with them.
Judith Weir
#94. As a consumer, I don't create art, but I think whatever the message is, art has to touch you.
Ha-Joon Chang
#95. Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.
John Ford
#96. The magic question is, 'What for?' But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal.
William McDonough
#97. In literature and art memory is a synonym for invention. It is the life-blood of imagination, which faints and dies when the veins are empty.
Robert Aris Willmott
#98. 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
#99. The greatest foe to art is luxury, art cannot live in its atmosphere.
William Morris
#100. The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.
Leonardo Da Vinci
