Top 100 Art Is Quotes
#1. The not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.
Donald Barthelme
#2. Oh! Do not excite yourself. Shall I say that he interested me because he was trying to grow a mustache and as yet the result is poor." Poirot stroked his own magnificent mustache tenderly. "It is an art," he murmured, "the growing of the mustache! I have sympathy for all who attempt it.
Agatha Christie
#5. 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
#6. Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.
Rita Mae Brown
#7. The key is to integrate our art into our life, not the other way around.
Brooks Jensen
#8. Why is art beautiful? Because it's useless. Why is life ugly? Because it's all ends and purposes and intentions.
Fernando Pessoa
#9. We create our own reality. The blessing (or problem) with this is that when one creates one's own reality, one must live it! Are you living a blessing or is it a curse?
Gary R. Ryan
#10. 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
#11. In some Arab art exhibitions that have happened, there's always this idea that the East is more traditional; they show a lot of works on calligraphy and religion.
Massimiliano Gioni
#12. There's a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat.
Mario Batali
#13. He destroys that he might build; for when He is about to rear His sacred temple in us, He first totally razes that vain and pompous edifice, which human art and power had erected, and from its horrible ruins a new structure is formed, by His power only.
Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon
#14. Religions are strange. They seem to be caught in some dream which they won't give up and trying to convince others of the truth of their dream, when in fact each person is having their own dream. Take what you need from the religions and just leave the rest, and be all right with that.
Art Hochberg
#15. 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
#16. My focus on silence is to be understood as an intrinsic part of the body's search for meaning amongst the noisy assaults of everyday life ... What quilts have brought to the viewing of art generally is this intervening layer of silence, of collected thought and concerted attention.
Radka Donnell
#17. Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.
Gregory Bateson
#18. 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
#19. Art is the expression of an enormous preference.
Wyndham Lewis
#20. As most doctors will tell you, cleansing is ridiculous. You know what's been around longer than that state-of-the-art juicer? Your kidneys. And your liver. Still, the cleanse has recalibrated my definition of a splurge.
Sloane Crosley
#21. All of my art is suitcase-sized. I always paint in mediums that dry pretty quickly because I've got to throw them in my suitcase and go. And I have so much because of that, because it's what I've always done to pass the time, and I like it.
Alison Mosshart
#22. Does the thoughtful man suppose that ... the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?
George Santayana
#23. I answer, Socrates, that rhetoric is the art of persuasion in courts of law and other assemblies, as I was just now saying, and about the just and unjust.
Gorgias
#24. Art is just a series of natural gestures. For God's sake, don't try to be artistic - all wild animals walk the same way.
John Marin
#25. When you are learning about a martial art, it is about respect.
Jackie Chan
#26. It is the powerful who know how to honour, it is their art, their domain for invention.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#27. Speed, the fundamental condition of the activities of our day is the power of photography, indeed the modern art of today, the art of the split second.
Lisette Model
#28. The art of spreading rumors may be compared to the art of pin-making. There is usually some truth, which I call the wire; as this passes from hand to hand, one gives it a polish, another a point, others make and put on the head, and at last the pin is completed.
John Newton
#29. Art is not a mirror held up to society but a hammer with which to shape it.
Bertolt Brecht
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. If movies and music are vehicles for emotionally "hooking" people into Hollywood worldviews, then the best countermeasure is to create more compelling, more beautiful forms of art that express a biblical worldview.
Nancy Pearcey
#34. Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.
James Freeman Clarke
#35. Everywhere there is craft and technique; everywhere there is artistry and form. Art itself, technique, is ponderous and clumsy, and because of its awkwardness it obstructs that inner element ...
Kazimir Malevich
#36. What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.
Rabindranath Tagore
#37. 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
#38. It has been a sort of maxim, that the greatest art is to conceal art; but I know not how, among some people we meet with, their greatest cunning is to appear cunning.
Richard Steele
#39. 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
#40. O sleepers! what a thing is slumber! Sleep resembles death. Ah, why then dost thou not work in such wise as that after death thou mayst retain a resemblance to perfect life, when, during life, thou art in sleep so like to the hapless dead?
Leonardo Da Vinci
#41. 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
#43. 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
#44. The impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty.
Barnett Newman
#45. Man is apt to be more moved by the art of his own period, not because it is more perfect, but because it is organically related to him.
Ilya Ehrenburg
#46. I know it's superficial, and you can't measure art, which is supposed to be up to the individual, but I've watched the Oscars since I was a baby with my mother.
Kerry Condon
#47. If art is to have a special train, the critic must keep some seats reserved on it.
Oscar Wilde
#48. A city's art must give the impression that art is as indispensable a thing as water, or food.
Pier Giorgio Di Cicco
#50. Poetry is more than just art, it's like super glue to a broken heart. It can also be a light when your life seems a little dark.
Delano Johnson
#51. 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
#52. I figured out that art would be the perfect place for me because what's encouraged is the invention of languages.
David Altmejd
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Their 'magic' is Art, delivered from many of its human limitations.
J.R.R. Tolkien
#56. Yes, I believe that the art of winning is through intimidation, and not necessarily do you have to speak about it.
Mark Spitz
#57. What I strive most to achieve in art is to make you forget the material. The sculptor must ... communicate whatever struck his sensibility, so that a person beholding his work may experience in its entirety the emotion felt by the artist while he observed nature.
Medardo Rosso
#58. Art is one step from the visibly known toward the unknown. MS-71
Kahlil Gibran
#59. 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
#60. MANY MANAGE TO SEPARATE THEIR LIFE FROM THEIR FILMS. THEY LIVE ONE WAY AND EXPRESS OTHER IDEAS IN THEIR WORKS. THEY ARE ABLE TO SPLIT THEIR CONSCIENCE. I CAN'T. TO ME CINEMA IS NOT JUST MY JOB: IT'S MY LIFE, AND EACH FILM IS AN ACT OF MY LIFE.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#61. People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were.
Edward R. Murrow
#62. The country is so wounded, bleeding, and hurt right now. The country needs to be healed-it's not going to be healed from the top, politically. How are we going to heal? Art is the healing force.
Robert Redford
#63. 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
#64. Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.
Lin Yutang
#65. If there is heaven then there must be hell too, don't think that The God is merciful, he didn't create hell for himself.
John Art
#66. Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate taste.
Nikki Giovanni
#67. Modern Art is being used to index me. Surely it was a source but photographers have influenced Modern Art quite as deeply as they have been influenced, maybe more. Anyway painters don't have a copyright on M. A. We were all born in the same upheaval.
Edward Weston
#68. This is the body's nurse; but since man's wit
Found the art of cookery, to delight his sense,
More bodies are consumed and kill'd with it
Than with the sword, famine, or pestilence.
John Davies Of Hereford
#69. Art is the only place you can do what you like. That's freedom.
Paula Rego
#70. Rhyme is the rock on which thou art to wreck.
John Dryden
#71. I think when something becomes a comfortable genre, it's against what street art stood for in the beginning - breaking out of genres and taking art out of galleries. Now street art is in the gallery, and it's all made up into a nice, packaged concept.
M.I.A.
#72. A mystery confounds the problem of industry in art. In the last analysis, to work is simply not enough. But we have to act as if it were, leaving reward aside.
Anne Truitt
#73. A work of art is finished, from the point of view of the artist, when feeling and perception have resulted in a spiritual synthesis.
Hans Hofmann
#75. We are all born artists. If you have kids, you know what I mean. Almost everything kids do is art. They draw with crayons on the wall.
Kim Young-ha
#76. 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
#77. Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.
Jonathan Swift
#79. I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.
Ralph Vaughan Williams
#80. 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
#81. ... That little narrative is an example of the mathematician's art: asking simple and elegant questions about our imaginary creations, and crafting satisfying and beautiful explanations. There is really nothing else quite like this realm of pure idea; it's fascinating, it's fun, and it's free!
Paul Lockhart
#82. 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
#83. Latin American Art is an operational term used to describe art actually made in the more than twenty countries that make up Latin America and that encompass Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean.
Mari Carmen Ramirez
#86. Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations.
Rollo May
#87. Art requires imagination. It requires Creativity. Creativity requires experience and experience comes from your life. And your life is expressed in your art.
Bruce Lee
#88. Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of communication.
Jean Dubuffet
#89. He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.
John Ruskin
#90. Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.
George Edward Woodberry
#91. Bad art is always basically creepy; that is its first and most obvious identifying sign
John Gardner
#92. If anything is worth trying at all, it's worth trying at least 10 times.
Art Linkletter
#93. You can't really have art without having a sense of community as art is for others to enjoy as well.
Jaime Zevallos
#94. 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
#95. Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.
William Osler
#96. The art of diplomacy is the luck of knowing more of your rival's secrets than he knows of yours.
Robin Hobb
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. True healing is not physical - it is a spiritual awakening to our True Self. If art is used for that purpose then it can be quite healing as it purifies the mind of thoughts that create disease.
Judith Cornell
#100. The sadness of the incomplete, the sadness that is often Life, but should never be Art.
E. M. Forster
