Top 95 Art Line Quotes
#1. For good-intentioned people making decisions, there's no such thing as a bad choice. So it doesn't matter what you choose. Choose something, then deliberately line up with the choice you make. This is the art of alignment and allowing. (paraphrased)
Abraham Hicks
#2. Art is like politics. Any theory carried too far ends in sterility, and freshness is only gained by following some other line.
Amy Lowell
#3. Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.
G.K. Chesterton
#4. This is something that I cannot get over
that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character.
Karl Kraus
#6. The bottom line is, painting, at its richest, is done best with no purpose whatsoever aside from pleasing the person making the art.
Charles Sovek
#7. [T]here's a thin line separating the delicate from the bloodless, in art as in food.
Amit Chaudhuri
#9. Some part of me knew that I could play this part well, or better than well. But I was almost afraid to play it. The line between stage and life was so fragile here that I felt a risk of losing myself somehow.
J.B. Cheaney
#10. About 1998, when 'Wide World of Sports' and the 'Footy Show' came to an end for me, I couldn't type. When I started architecture, it was a very aesthetic, creative, an almost art process, where lettering and thick line were how you expressed yourself on the paper.
Max Walker
#11. I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.
Walter Kirn
#12. Art should be linked to abstract things - color, line, tone. It is not an instrument to improve social conditions and chase ugliness. Painting is like music and it has to separate from everyday reality.
Irving Stone
#13. There is always a commanding and simple line around each head. Learn to have a love for the big simple line.
Robert Henri
#14. I like elegance. I like art nouveau; a stretched line or curve. These things are very much in the foreground of my work.
H.R. Giger
#15. All painting - the painting of the past as well as of the present - shows us that its essential plastic means were only line and color.
Piet Mondrian
#17. Performance art is going to be the future. Plays on Broadway are so restricted. But performance art is like haikus, just one line thing. And it's more casual but more interesting.
Yoko Ono
#18. Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.
Oscar Wilde
#19. The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy ... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?
Henry James
#20. My advice to young people wanting to make music and to be in this industry is to really spend your time making music. Make so much music you have no friends. Make music. Figure out what it is you love, and ... because if you're making cool art, then everything else will fall into line.
Lorde
#21. The English artist likes line more than color or texture.
Neville Weston
#22. A line is a dot that went for a walk.
Paul Klee
#23. Apart, that is, from the line of artistically naked ladies along its parapets. They were holding urns; urns is art.
Terry Pratchett
#24. I would like to apologize to Brock Lesnar, his family, the UFC and the UFC fans for my stupid remarks. I respect Brock, all the other fighters, and the sport of mixed martial arts. I'm sorry that I stepped out of line.
Frank Mir
#25. Perfection seems sterile; it is final, no mystery in it; it's a product of an assembly line.
Dejan Stojanovic
#26. The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.
Arthur Erickson
#27. A fairly clear line separated advertisement from art. The First Effect I should say the first effect of the triumph of the capitalist (if we allow him to triumph) will be that that line of demarcation will entirely disappear.
G.K. Chesterton
#28. One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill.
Adrienne Rich
#29. I wouldn't want to do an average fashion line. I'd want it to be an amazing piece of art.
Rita Ora
#30. If you criticize what you're doing too early you'll never write the first line.
[Paris Review, interview with Jodi Daynard, The Art of Fiction No. 113, Winter II 1989]
Max Frisch
#31. So it's mix and match. Hold your line when you really feel something you're saying is wonderful and you really want to get this point across and prove it to your partner by just throwing it into the tape and letting it speak for itself.
Art Garfunkel
#32. There is a line that I always loved from Lucretius. He said, "The sublime is the art of exchanging easier for more difficult pleasures." The presumption of that formulation is that the more difficult pleasures are actually better than the easier pleasures. That is why one makes the exchange.
Andrew Solomon
#33. There is no line between fine art and illustration; there is no high or low art; there is only art, and it comes in many forms. (p. 12)
James Gurney
#34. There's a very fine line between being artistic and being a dickhead - it's like love and hate.
Peter Hook
#35. How does an artist know when the line that he just painted is good or not good? That's the catch. De Kooning was the greatest of my contemporaries in art, and he knew when he'd done a good line. When he didn't, he threw it away. I wish I'd thrown away some of mine.
Philip Johnson
#36. Art is a shadow of what a person is thinking ... a small glimpse of what they hold inside. Little secrets, regrets, joys ... every line has its own meaning.
Sarah
#37. Art and nature shall always be wrestling until they eventually conquer one another so that the victory is the same stroke and line: that which is conquered, conquers at the same time.
Maria Sibylla Merian
#38. I want constructive energy generated by every brushstroke and between every line.
Siren Waroe
#39. I don't think you can talk about progress in art - movement, but not progress. You can speak of a point on a line for the purpose of locating things, but it's a horizontal line, not a vertical one.
Donald Barthelme
#40. Art is harmony. Harmony is the analogy of contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of line, conditioned by the dominate key, and under the influence of a particular light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations.
Georges Seurat
#41. In a battle, as in a siege, the art consists in concentrating very heavy fire on a particular point. The line of battle once established, the one who has the ability to concentrate an
unlooked for mass of artillery suddenly and unexpectedly on one of these points is sure to carry the day.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#42. Who knows when a trenchant line becomes a human face?
Ben Shahn
#43. The hardest things to do in any art is to risk failure and put yourself out on the line.
Oscar Isaac
#44. That's the history of art - you have to consider yourself fortunate if you ever get acknowledged. If you have a critical success that's also a financial success and that you feel good about ... If things line up, that's pretty rare.
Richard Linklater
#45. A standard line, promoted by people like Clement Greenberg, is that politics contaminates art, and Manet is often cited as an example of art for art's sake.
Hans Haacke
#46. Writing for myself and writing for another artist are two very different experiences. When I handle both the story and the art, I have full control. I can endlessly tweak every word and every line.
Gene Luen Yang
#47. There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.
Toni Morrison
#48. What makes a set of lines and colors into art is the relationship between this line and that one; the way one color or form echoes another in a different part of the canvas.
Daniel Levitin
#49. To select, combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art.
J. M. W. Turner
#51. But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.
John Fowles
#52. In England, there is a dividing line between artists and illustrators, who are thought inferior to painters. Well, that's absolute rubbish. Some of the most creative work is being done in children's books. In Japan, everything is art. They don't say painting is better than ceramics or dress design.
Brian Wildsmith
#53. What is art but the life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
#54. Because we are saturated with life, because we are human, our strongest motive is life, humanity; and the stronger the motive back of the line the stronger, and therefore more beautiful, the line will be.
Robert Henri
#55. Any work aspiring to be art however humble should carry its justification in every line.
Joseph Conrad
#56. Drawing is the probity of art. To draw does not mean simply to reproduce contours; drawing does not consist merely of line: drawing is also expression, the inner form, the plane, the modeling. See what remains after that.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
#57. I like science and I love gym. Oh, and I like art, but I'm really bad at it. I'm just a terrible drawer. I can't draw a circle. Even with a ruler, I can't draw a straight line.
Daniel Radcliffe
#58. The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture ... Sometimes ... it seems to me that ... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.
Michelangelo
#59. Those who were still able to write beautiful melodies were kitsch composers like Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky approaches true art not in his numerous beautiful melodies, but when a melodic line is thwarted.
Slavoj Zizek
#60. My goal is to draw a line with some 'flavor' to it.
Andy Couturier
#61. I remember later he said (Professor Higgins again), you don't really stand a dog's chance anyhow. You're too pretty. The art of love's your line: not the love of art.
John Fowles
#62. The nation that will insist upon drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking by cowards.
William Butler
#63. It is my hope that photography may fall in line with all the other arts and with her infinite possibilities, do things strange and more fascinating than the most fantastic dreams.
Alvin Langdon Coburn
#64. Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you that music has boundaries. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.
Charlie Parker
#65. Science is a line, art a superficies, and life or the knowledge of God, a solid.
Coventry Patmore
#66. There's a fine line between minimalism and not trying very hard.
Tom Pappalardo
#67. I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
Marshall McLuhan
#68. 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
#69. Line of control should be a garden, a place of art and cultural festival.
Amit Ray
#70. Hollywood used to be run by artists and people who loved artists ... people who wanted to make movies for all the right reasons. For the love. The Art. To tell stories. Yes to make money as well, but it was about both. Now I feel, it's mostly about bottom line and making money.
Matthew Lillard
#71. Limit your day to what you feel comfortable with doing - put the rest on the shelf - for further consideration down the line.
Art Hochberg
#72. As Oscar Wilde once wrote, "Morality, like art, means drawing a line somewhere." The question is: where is the line?
Dan Ariely
#73. Art is the filigrain of a little mind, and is twisted and involved and curled, but would reach farther if laid out in a straight line.
Horace Walpole
#74. The cynical, caustic, acid-tongued New York drama critic Addison De Witt introduces his protege/date of the moment, a bimbo date and so-called actress named Miss Casswell (Marilyn Monroe) in another very famous line: "Miss Casswell is an actress, a graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art."
George Sanders
#75. I drew no line between life and art. I was the same on- as offstage.
Patti Smith
#76. Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.
Huston Smith
#77. There is no finish line. When you reach one goal, find a new one.
Chuck Norris
#78. The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.
Allan Kaprow
#79. I tried the line out on some people on the street, like, "What do you think of this: 'the art of family life is to not take it personally'?" And they would laugh. But you know, everybody's got something going on in their families, and then once you have kids, that of course exponentially rises.
Mary Kay Zuravleff
#80. Only a free hand can draw a free line.
Marty Rubin
#82. Drawing is the cornerstone of the graphic, plastic arts. Drawing is the coordination of line, tone, and color symbols into formations that express the artist's thought.
John French Sloan
#83. I have many creative outlets. I sing, I like music, I like art, I paint, I draw. I like buying art. I read a lot, too. I love books. And I'm working on a clothing line, too.
Evan Ross
#84. A Curve does not exist in its full power until contrasted with a straight line.
Robert Henri
#85. With regard to ground of this nature, be before the enemy in occupying the raised and sunny spots, and carefully guard your line of supplies. Then you will be able to fight with advantage.
Sun Tzu
#86. Sometimes writing a single line is enough to save your own heart.
Clarice Lispector
#87. Drawing is the art of taking a line for a walk.
Paul Klee
#88. In the first grade, I already knew the pattern of my life. I didn't know the living of it, but I knew the line ... From the first day in school until the day I graduated, everyone gave me one hundred plus in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go to the place where you got one hundred plus.
Louise Berliawsky Nevelson
#89. Never fool yourself into perceiving things that don't exist. It's a fine line to walk, but sympathy is not an art for the weak willed. He
Patrick Rothfuss
#90. First I have a think, and then I put a line around it.
Roger Fry
#91. Our experience of any painting is always the latest line in a long conversation we've been having with painting. There's no way of looking at art as though you hadn't seen art before.
Brian Eno
#92. I was always most interested in drawing - most of my childhood drawings are black-and-white line work. And when I kind of abandoned comics, through college and art school, I was doing a lot of painting. But once I started doing comics again, everything else just fell by the wayside.
Jeffrey Brown
#93. In the 1970s when I started in the art world, no self-respecting artist would have stood in line to try to get on a television show. It never would have happened.
Jeffrey Deitch
#94. The bottom line is we must get off our duff and make an effort to succeed. Trust me on this, when you see someone successful in any of the arts they have been willing to make an extra effort.
Jack White
#95. The only line that's wrong in Shakespeare is 'holding a mirror up to nature.' You hold a magnifying glass up to nature. As an actor you just enlarge it enough so that your audience can identify with the situation. If it were a mirror, we would have no art.
Montgomery Clift
