Top 100 Art Is Work Quotes
#1. To be a teacher is my greatest work of art.
Joseph Beuys
#2. The work of art is above all a process of creation.
Paul Klee
#3. I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art) is never really finished; it is abandoned.
Brooke McEldowney
#4. A work of art is one through which the consciousness of the artist is able to give its emotions to anyone who is prepared to receive them. There is no such thing as bad art.
Muriel Rukeyser
#5. It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
John Irving
#7. O thou sculptor, painter, poet! Take this lesson to thy heart: That is best which lieth nearest; Shape from that thy work of art.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#8. Having lots of people talking highly of you and respecting your art and your work, this is one of the best feelings that you can have.
Peter Gabriel
#9. One must have a high opinion of a work of art - not the work one is creating at the moment, but of that which one desires to achieve one day. Without this it is not worthwhile working.
Edgar Degas
#10. Thought and plot are not so important as some would make them out to be. The object of any work of art is the transference of emotion; talent is the gift of conveying that emotion
James Joyce
#11. All persistent practices in art have a creative function. They may serve several ends, but the chief one is the shaping of the work.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#12. The secret to life is to put yourself in the right lighting. For some, it's a Broadway spotlight; for others, a lamplit desk. Use your natural powers
of persistence, concentration, and insight
to do work you love and work that matters. Solve problems. make art, think deeply.
Susan Cain
#13. I am convinced that each work of art, be it a great work of genius or something very small, has its own life, and it will come to the artist, the composer or the writer or the painter, and
say, "Here I am: compose me; or write me; or paint me"; and the job of the artist is to serve the work.
Madeleine L'Engle
#14. Each work of art is a collection of signs invented during the picture's execution to suit the needs of their position. Taken out of the composition for which they were created, these signs have no further use.
Henri Matisse
#15. A poet feels the impulse to create a work of art when the passive awe provoked by an event is transformed into a desire to express that awe in a rite of worship.
W. H. Auden
#16. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#18. Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Bruce Lee are my masters; they're the inspiration for my work. Bruce Lee was a heavy fighter who threw hard punches. Jackie moves very fast and uses a lot of comedy, and Jet Li is very fluid. I've tried to combine all of their styles and added some things of my own
Tatchakorn Yeerum
#19. Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power ... Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#20. The fact that biological, or 'natural' rules might help in the creation of a computer generated work of art is interesting, but even a wonderful work of art made in this fashion isn't the same as a person, with all his or her experiences and emotions involved, making art.
Steven Levy
#21. The work of art is born of the artist in a mysterious and secret way. From him it gains life and being. Nor is its existence casual and inconsequent, but it has a definite and purposeful strength, alike in its material and spiritual life.
Wassily Kandinsky
#23. There is something wrong with a work of art if it can be understood by a policeman.
Patrick Kavanagh
#24. My mother is an artist, and I have a strong visual sense. I almost always choose the cover art for my books. I've learned that the more I collaborate, like by having someone do a soundtrack to one of my books, the more I see my own work differently.
Jeff VanderMeer
#25. The hardest part of art-making is living your life in such a way that your work gets done-over and over-and that means, among other things, finding a host of practices that are just plain useful.
David Bayles
#26. Communication
Is a work of art
Some are normally born with it
Some may need a chart
A. Saleh
#27. Good art has everything you need to know about it in the work, not on a wall label. Art is here to take us beyond language.
Walter Darby Bannard
#28. In general the parallel between the popular uses of music and of pictures is close enough. Both consist of 'using' rather than 'receiving'. Both rush hastily forward to do things with the work of art instead of waiting for it to do something to them.
C.S. Lewis
#29. Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural
Jonah Lehrer
#30. The important thing about Paris is not so much that one sees exciting work, but one meets people who feel that art is worth living completely for. This whole atmosphere is very good for work.
John Olsen
#31. You don't have to have a great art idea - just get to work and something will happen. So that's pretty much my modus operandi and pretty much my principal position, such as it is.
Chuck Close
#32. The artistic impulse seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly deserts us half-way, after the idea is born; and if we go on, it is labor.
Clarence Day
#33. The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.
Jerry Saltz
#34. An eyewitness account is evidence that an artist has proposed a work of art. But documentary evidence (i.e. a photograph) is more conclusive.
Dieter Roth
#35. What is the universe? Is it a great 3D movie in which we are the unwilling actors? Is it a cosmic joke, a giant computer, a work of art by a Supreme Being or simply an experiment? The problem in trying to understand the universe is that we have nothing to compare it to.
Heinz Pagels
#36. In our time art is encrusted with a noisy, opaque, logorrhea of theory that prevents a work from coming into direct, media free, non-interpreted contact with its viewer (its reader, its listener)
Milan Kundera
#37. Art is not in some far-off place. A work of art is the expression of a man's whole personality, sensibility and ability.
Shinichi Suzuki
#38. There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.
Jerome Bruner
#39. A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.
Vladimir Nabokov
#40. A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence against property: it is an offence against life.
Anthony Burgess
#41. The name of our proper connection to the earth is 'good work,' for good work involves much giving of honor. It honors the source of its materials; it honors the place where it is done; it honors the art by which it is done; it honors the thing that it makes and the user of the made thing.
Wendell Berry
#42. Great work comes from great joy. Leave the angst for the movies; do art - that is fun.
Jack White
#43. The true contemplative is one who has discovered the art of finding leisure even in the midst of his work, by working with such a spirit of detachment and recollection that even his work is a prayer
Thomas Merton
#44. Shamanic journeying is the inner art of traveling to the 'invisible worlds' beyond ordinary reality to retrieve information for change in any area of your life - from spirituality and health to work and relationships.
Sandra Ingerman
#45. A work is not art until enough noise has been made about it and someone rich comes along and buys it.
Alfred Stieglitz
#46. (speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.
Andre Breton
#47. How can educated and sophisticated viewers react so differently to a work of art? Is it just Kulture Klash? No, since most of the time there's no Klash at all. On the occasions when we disagree, it may be because we're looking for different things in dance.
Robert Gottlieb
#48. In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist's obsession with his subject; the form is always in proportion to the obsession.
Alberto Giacometti
#49. Those of us who work in the arts know that depiction is not endorsement. If it was, no artist would be able to paint inhumane practices, no author could write about them, and no filmmaker could delve into the thorny subjects of our time.
Kathryn Bigelow
#50. When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.
Madeleine L'Engle
#51. There is no work of art that is without short cuts.
Andre Gide
#52. For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.
Joyce Cary
#54. The work is what it is and hopefully it's seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I'm not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit about feminist stuff.
Cindy Sherman
#55. Dancers are a work of art - they are the canvas on which their work is painted.
Patrick Duffy
#56. My life - autism's an important part of it, but it bothers me when I see kids where autism and their autism is the only thing they think about. I'd rather have them think about, you know, some art work they were gonna do or some science they wanted to do.
Temple Grandin
#57. My furniture, boxes, and turnings are simple, practical designs for everyday use. I love the grain and beauty of wood. Each piece of lumber is a work of art, after all, and I'd like to honor that gift and pass it on for someone else to appreciate.
Steve Miller
#58. Don't shut yourself up in a band box because you are a woman, but understand what is going on, and educate yourself to take part in the world's work, for it all affects you and yours.
Louisa May Alcott
#59. 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
#60. Painting, art in general, enchants me. It is my life. What else matters? When you put all your soul into a work, all that is noble in you, you cannot fail to find a kindred soul who understands you, and you do not need a host of such spirits. Is not that all an artist should wish for?
Camille Pissarro
#61. What's nice about both clouds, and art, is that you can look at them and just resonate. That can be good for both the heart and the mind.
Ogden W. Rogers
#62. The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art you can create at that point in your life - a book that may only reach or move a few people but will seem to those people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation.
Claire Messud
#63. Art is not made only one way, art is a point of view? Rembrandt in our days would be Rembrandt again, because the work of the master is his self. But in order to be Rembrandt in ourdayshe would have used new ways that would give a new culture.
Marianne Von Werefkin
#64. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.
Freya Stark
#65. I don't want to be here when my latest work of accidental art is discovered.
Becca Fitzpatrick
#66. Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.
Marcel Proust
#67. 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
#68. Secrets can actually be quite important. A work of art that reveals its meaning or its power too quickly is uninteresting. It might not even be a good work of art.
Thomas Koerfer
#69. A picture is a work of art, not because it is 'modern,' nor because it is 'ancient,' but because it is a sincere expression of human feeling.
John F. Carlson
#70. The measure of a work of art is how much art it has in it, not how much 'relevance'. Relevant to whom? Relevant to what? Nothing is more ephemeral than a hot topic.
Edward St. Aubyn
#71. Movie acting may not have a certain kind of glory as true art, but it is damn hard work.
William Holden
#72. The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.
Lewis Mumford
#73. To know how to produce a work of art is to know how to discard the extraneous.
Laura Esquivel
#74. If by day art is in the service of business, the evenings are devoted to the businessman's enjoyment of it. That is asking a lot of art, but art and the businessman make it work.
Karl Kraus
#75. 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
#76. The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.
John Ruskin
#78. What is art is not likely to be decided for decades or longer after the work has been producedand then is often redecidedso we must not think badly if we regard literature as entertainment rather than as transcendent enlightenment.
Richard Condon
#79. A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.
Marcel Proust
#80. It is the Lord's work, and it must be done; my Lord has bidden me do it, and in his strength I will accomplish it." Christian, art thou thus "with all thine heart" serving thy Master?
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
#81. A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
Albert Camus
#82. The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)
C.S. Lewis
#83. To look at a work of art and then to make a judgement as to whether or not it is art, and whether or not it is Christian, is presumptuous.
Madeleine L'Engle
#84. Dept. of Speculation is gorgeous, funny, a profound and profoundly moving work of art. Jenny Offill is a master of form and feeling, and she gets life on the page in new, startling ways.
Sam Lipsyte
#85. The strong experience of nature ... is the necessary basis for all conception of art on which rests the grandeur and beauty of all future work.
Paul Cezanne
#86. The work of art is, after all, an act of faith in our ability to communicate symbolically.
Ralph Ellison
#87. Too often, complaint is not about principled objection on moral grounds, but opportunistic objection on grounds of self-interest. To rectify this, we need to work on mastering the art of complaint.
Julian Baggini
#88. The representative element in a work of art may or may not be harmful, but it is always irrelevant. For to appreciate a work of art, we must bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its affairs and ideas, no familiarity with its emotions.
Clive Bell
#89. 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
#90. I think that spirituality is important for all people to develop. I don't mean there necessarily has to be a religious aspect to spirituality. Some people are spiritual in a religious way, other people are spiritual in their work and in their art and in their treatment of other people.
Assata Shakur
#91. Let's talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included ... something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It's a Gigantic project.
Joseph Beuys
#92. A beautiful lady is an accident of nature. A beautiful old lady is a work of art.
Louis Nizer
#93. Art is challenging and frustrating but I don't linger in it. I work on five paintings at a time so if I'm frustrated I put one down and begin another.
Robert Bateman
#94. The reason why the continental European is, to the Englishman or American, so surprisingly ignorant of the Bible, is that the authorized English version is a great work of literary art, and the continental versions are comparatively artless.
George Bernard Shaw
#95. Like the people that in the 60s or 70s claimed the "end of painting" - all they did was open up a whole new branch for painting. Happily, it doesn't work. It's not a reason for art. Closing something out is not a reason for something to exist.
Lawrence Weiner
#96. Writers have the purity of their art and what they want to achieve with that, and that this purity is bound up with the messy material conditions of trying to make a living while doing that work.
Chad Harbach
#98. What artists call posterity is the posterity of the work of art.
Marcel Proust
#99. Among the masked dandies of Edwardian comedy, Max Beerbohm is the most happily armored by a deep and almost innocent love of himself as a work of art.
V.S. Pritchett
#100. My studio is arranged so that I have a comfortable seating area for meeting with clients, an office area beyond that and a painting area, which includes room for art students to sit and watch as I work.
Doug Dawson
