Top 100 Art Meaning Quotes
#1. A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art.
Anthony Burgess
#2. Art should startle the viewer into thinking about the meaning of life.
Antoni Tapies
#4. To feel the meaning of what one is doing, and to rejoice in that meaning; to unite in one concurrent fact the unfolding of the inner life and the ordered development of material conditions
that is art.
John Dewey
#5. We, this nation of ours, could be the richest nation in the world. We could be the freest nation in the world - but only if the arts are alive and flourishing can we experience the true meaning of our freedom, and know the full glory of the human spirit.
Richard M. Nixon
#6. Artists are prophets. They define the meaning of our lives and point the way.
Tony Bouza
#7. Art - the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.
Lawrence Durrell
#8. 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
#9. I suppose I have come to realize that entertainment is not easily dismissed. Beyond the meaning (of a work of art), it is important to people. Without it, lives can be dull.
Stan Lee
#10. That life has no clear meaning is the best possible news for an artist.
Marty Rubin
#11. People look at a chair and say, "It's just a chair," but I like to think it's more than a chair. I like to seek deeper meaning in things, even inanimate things. I know this makes me sound like a complete nutcase, but (a) I swear I'm not, and (b) it's just an example.
Connor Franta
#12. What do you mean by meant? Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is it the only value passing time as comfortably as possible?
John Green
#13. I lived through being pooh-poohed by fine art galleries, saying, "Digital is going to destroy the meaning behind photos." The motion side, the moment all of the cameras come alive with that motion, it was like a dream come true. It enables people to economically experiment with film.
Russell James
#14. A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning.
E.B. White
#15. The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.
Camille Paglia
#16. What is art? ( ... ) Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life - love and sacrifice.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#17. I cannot be convinced that great artists are moralists. Art is first appearances, then meaning.
Camille Paglia
#18. A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, 'The Clock' is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself - something almost inhuman.
Jerry Saltz
#19. The child will leave the nest. The best paint job will crack. The best play will become boring. The best work will grow tedious. The best art will lose meaning. The greatest creation will decay. Behind all this, lies my true self.
Vironika Tugaleva
#20. Unfortunately, the boards of art institutions tend to be populated with well-meaning supporters of the arts who often lack any business background or appetite for imposing appropriate discipline.
Eli Broad
#21. Can't it just exist without an explanation? Why do we have to assign meaning to art? Do we need to understand everything? Maybe it exists to evoke feelings and emotions
period. Not to mean something.
Matthew Quick
#22. It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
Anais Nin
#23. Artists are interpreters for us of richness and meaning. Artists can reinforce a healthy sense of God's grandeur and nearness.
Sandra Bowden
#24. A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.
Leonard Bernstein
#25. The meaning of culture is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.
John Cowper Powys
#26. Everything on my body has a meaning. I don't do art just because. It does look cool but it also has a meaning.
Carmelo Anthony
#27. I missed him like madness. I missed him so I lay in bed every night and cried for an hour. I missed him so that food had no taste and art had no beauty and life had no meaning.
Annabel Joseph
#28. Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don't think you can get along without it. It's the confirmation of meaning in life.
Robert Adams
#29. We make art so that we can feel life. We do science to understand it.
Preeti Bhonsle
#30. Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence.
Roger Scruton
#31. The idea of the culture that you live in determining meaning in your art, though, is a very important aspect of what art would be about. But that had more to do with the kind of general understanding of what the hell you're doing, you know.
Robert Barry
#32. My heart was full and uplifted; it seemed that in my soul the question arose whether such things as Art, literature, science encompassed and completed life or whether there was still something in the distance which encompassed it even more completely and filled it with a far greater happiness.
Adalbert Stifter
#33. It's just a combination of letters I liked. And when your whole art's based on the lettering you choose, you kinda figure out what ones work together. I just liked the shapes of the k, a, w, s. It has no meaning.
KAWS
#34. It's a shame when other people's gambling habits change the meaning of paintings or when fluctuations of value start to dictate how people perceive art because it's too expensive to be interesting or moving. That's when I get bummed out.
Nate Lowman
#35. As a writer, I can't really take days off. Writing is like creating an art. Once you stop writing, you can lose your rhythm and context, meaning that your writing may lose its power.
Andrea Hirata
#36. Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness ... meaning at-oneness, the state of being at one with the object.
D.H. Lawrence
#37. The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.
Viktor E. Frankl
#38. Design has purpose, Art has meaning. Find purpose and meaning in your life.
Nor Sanavongsay
#39. (Jean) Fautrier's exhibition (in Paris 1945,fh) made an extremely strong impression on me. Art had never before appeared so fully realised in its pure state. The word 'art' had never before been so loaded with meaning for me.
Jean Dubuffet
#40. You can see the meaning of the statement that "Literature is a living art" most easily and clearly, perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes - say Pure Mathematics and Acting. Science as a rule deals with things, Art with man's thought and emotion about things.
Arthur Quiller-Couch
#41. Music is the biggest tool of revolution - the best way to reach out to the youth and involve them. If you can't contribute to the world with your art, I don't see the meaning of life.
Kailash Kher
#42. She danced because she needed to. She needed to say things which could be said in no other way, and she needed to take her meaning and her living from the saying of them.
Spider Robinson
#43. I've certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it.
Dani Shapiro
#44. In the example of the navigator, no writing was essential to draw the meaning of observing the object at a distance from the ship. In the real the
observation has been noted and that is enough to give it a meaning, a subjective meaning, a meaning exclusively important for the navigator himself.
Anuradha Bhattacharyya
#45. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
T. S. Eliot
#46. Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless.
Gerhard Richter
#47. We are living in a very complex society. It puts me in a complex frame of thinking.
Ai Weiwei
#48. There's a side that I want to do just like really retarded arty films like parody, pretentious art films that kind of are supposed to have some deep meaning.
Andy Milonakis
#49. Whatever you do in life, there's content and form; only those two put together create special meaning of a great work of art or great interpretation of music or a great story that you tell.
Itay Talgam
#50. Each one of these bodies (art-works Arp made) certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name.
Hans Arp
#51. Wanting to become stronger than everybody else has no meaning.
Christian Tissier
#52. Hip hop is still strong. As an art form, music helps people express themselves, find meaning in their own lives and connect with their tribes.
Erik Parker
#53. In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.
Vladimir Nabokov
#54. She gave life a meaning.
She was art, dressed like a painters pallet, bright and unaware of how goddam beautiful she could be turned into; with the right touch, her smile was the brush and her story was the canvas.
Nikki Rowe
#55. The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Modern art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world.
William Barrett
#56. 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
#57. Art should be expressed without objectification.It's more than just attraction. Creative expression is not "art for art's sake" but art that breathes true meaning.
Henry Johnson Jr
#58. But it's your Oracle," I protested. "Can't you tell us what the prophecy means?"
Apollo sighed. "You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear through the search.
Rick Riordan
#59. In our life there is a single color, as on an artist palette which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.
Marc Chagall
#60. As all Nature's thousands changes But one changeless God proclaim; So in Art's wide kingdom ranges One sole meaning still the same: This is Truth, eternal Reason, Which from Beauty takes its dress, And serene through time and season Stands aye in loveliness.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#61. Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.
John Ortberg
#62. The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and
Rebecca Solnit
#63. Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning ...
Iris Murdoch
#64. When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.
Twyla Tharp
#65. People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure ... People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure.
Leo Tolstoy
#66. Thou art but a feeble flower in the garden of the universe, yet thou hath a purpose much greater than thyself.
Raneem Kayyali
#67. Like art, religion is an imaginative and creative effort to find a meaning and value in human life.
Karen Armstrong
#68. The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents the true reality, not external aspects.
Aristotle.
#69. The inner drama is the meaning of the exterior event.
Aaron Siskind
#70. The life of our class, of the wealthy and the learned, was not only repulsive to me but had lost all meaning. The sum of our action and thinking, of our science and art, all of it struck me as the overindulgences of a spoiled child.
Leo Tolstoy
#71. Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.
Alexander Calder
#72. 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
#73. Some songs you get. Some songs you may not. And I think that's the beauty of art: to question and to ask, to understand the deeper meaning after two or three or four listenings.
Janelle Monae
#74. Our Father Who Art in Heaven gathered more meaning for me as my own father joined the Maker when I was still in school.
Andy Paula
#75. Puzzles are like songs - A good puzzle can give you all the pleasure of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.
Stephen Sondheim
#76. In art, the Trinity is expressed in the Creative Idea, the Creative Energy, and the Creative Power - the first imagining of the work, then the making incarnate of the work, and third the meaning of the work.
Dorothy L. Sayers
#77. I really do think that art can save you in some sense. It's the last meaning, unless you're religious-and I'm not religious. It's the only secular vehicle for transcendence we have. It's an immediate self-validating experience. It lifts you beyond your mortal clay.
Sam Savage
#78. There is a close connection between art and religion in the sense that both are concerned about questions of meaning - if not about the meaning of existence generally, then certainly about the meaning of one's individual life and how a person relates to his or her total community/environment.
Freeman Patterson
#79. A work of art enters life very much like another human being - complicated, loaded with overtones and meaning, mysterious, enticing, obsessive, and beautiful. There's no way to control how it will be used, how it will be read, and that's part of the excitement of it.
Budd Hopkins
#80. I've been lucky enough to live through all the things that are supposed to give meaning to our lives, like parenting, grandparenting, art, celebrity. All these things you expect meaning to come from, and sometimes it comes when you're not expecting it.
Alan Alda
#81. We are the ink that gives the white page a meaning.
Jean Genet
#82. Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down "Desolation Row." I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.
Patti Smith
#83. Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.
Freya Stark
#84. There are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art.
Peter Greenaway
#85. I was drawn to biology and history and, of course, art. And I loved languages. The biggest problem I had is that I wasn't taught about the connections between all these things. I think that would have given life a lot more meaning and it would be a lot more enjoyable.
Hussein Chalayan
#86. Life is the leaves which shape and nourish a plant, but art is the flower which embodies its meaning
Charles Rennie Mackintosh
#87. When any civilization is dust and ashes," he said, "art is all that's left over. Images, words, music. Imaginative structures. Meaning - human meaning, that is - is defined by them. You have to admit that.
Margaret Atwood
#88. Painting gave meaning to my life which without it would not have had
Francis Bacon
#89. 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
#90. There are many ways to find meaning in life, one of them is the love of art
Ndiritu Wahome
#91. But we must be aware that art cannot be used to show the validity of Christianity; it should rather be the reverse. Christianity is true; things and actions and human endeavor only get their meaning from their relationship to God.
H.R. Rookmaaker
#92. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
Vladimir Nabokov
#93. All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning
not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.
Michel Foucault
#94. The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines.
Joseph Conrad
#95. I wasn't political enough to write articles about myself or go to cocktail parties, meaning that not only has my art been pirated and my intellectual property rights stolen, but my work has been misrepresented.
Michael Heizer
#96. In interpreting a work of art, we draw upon our own aims and endeavors, inform it with a meaning that has its origin in our own ways of life and thought. In a word, any art that really affects us becomes to that extent modern art.
Arnold Hauser
#97. But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.
Molly Haskell
#98. I had just arrived in New York from California. I was nineteen years old and excited beyond belief. I was an art student and an acting student and behaved as most young actors did - meaning that there was no such thing as a good actor, 'cause you yourself hadn't shown up yet.
Robert Redford
#99. Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.
Edward Hirsch
#100. She knocked a third time, three regular strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for, modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help playing some tune of what we feel , upon the senseless wood.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
