Top 100 Art Of The Past Quotes
#1. All the art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time. Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life.
Alberto Giacometti
#2. In other words, man's imagination, when it is not corrupt, yearns for the holy - to behold its beauty from a distance, to be possessed by it. All the greatest art of the past, pagan and Christian, testifies to this desire. It
Anthony Esolen
#3. I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved 'isms' and twists.
Jerry Saltz
#4. It is not enough to deface the Mona Lisa because that does not kill the Mona Lisa. All art of the past must be destroyed.
Pierre Boulez
#5. One usually understands the art of the past by applying the conventions of the present thus misunderstanding the art of the past.
Sol LeWitt
#6. To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was ...
Pablo Picasso
#7. We take from the art of the past what we need. The variable posthumous reputations of even the greatest artists and the unpredictable revivals of interest in even the most obscure ones tend to reveal more about those who make revisionist assessments than about those who are being reassessed.
Martin Filler
#8. To me there is no past or future in art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today that it ever was.
Pablo Picasso
#9. Today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.
John Berger
#10. The emphasis on original, individual work in the past years has done a great deal to produce a crop of eccentric fakes and has carried art away from the stream of tradition. Tradition is our heritage of knowledge and experience. We can't get along without it.
John French Sloan
#11. The difference between writing a story and simply relating past events is that a story, in order to be acceptable, must have shape and meaning. It is the old idea that art is the bringing of order out of chaos ...
Katherine Paterson
#12. Art contained an undefined mystery that spoke to her soul.
Geraldine Solon
#13. The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends ...
Max Beerbohm
#14. 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
#15. The job of art is not to store moments of experience but to explore environments that are otherwise invisible. Art is not a retrieval system of precious moments of past cultures. Art has a live, ongoing function.
McLuhan CD-ROM
Marshall McLuhan
#16. The real story can never be told. It is untellable. The real (as real) is inaccessible, being gone in time. There is no point in glancing at the past, in summoning it up, in re-examining it, except on behalf of art - that is, the meaningful-real.
(The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952))
William, Saroyan
#17. The whole point of art, aside from the aesthetic pleasure it yields, is that it provides a bridge to the past; that seductive land where we all find certainty and consolation. Nothing quite spans this gulf with such immediacy as the art of popular song.
Barry Humphries
#18. The aggregate energy of all the great masters of the past and those of the present communicates the greatest possibilities of art. It is from this position that the artist attains colossal strength.
Jorg Immendorff
#19. To me, literature is a calling, even a kind of salvation. It connects me with an enterprise that is over 2,000 years old. What do we have from the past? Art and thought. That's what lasts. That's what continues to feed people and give them an idea of something better.
Susan Sontag
#20. We cleave to the past too much in Germany. All of our German art is too bogged down in the conventional ... I think more highly of a free person who consciously puts convention aside.
Paula Modersohn-Becker
#21. The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.
Vladimir Nabokov
#22. To establish yourself as a leading man, you're shooting for the smallest point on the target, and you get a lot of judgment thrown at you. It takes a lot for them to get past everything and just watch your art and what you're doing.
Josh Holloway
#23. The great World Champions Morphy, Steinitz, and Lasker were past masters in the art of Pawn play; they had no superiors in their handling of endgames. The present World Champion has not the strength of the other three as an endgame player, and is therefore inferior to them.
Jose Raul Capablanca
#24. No thanks. I'm not an artist." "You don't have to be. That's the beauty of creating art. It's cathartic. Think of your past, your present, your future. Draw what troubles you. It can be a face, a place, a story inside of one single image.
Keri Lake
#25. It's never easy letting go. But if we don't learn the art of relinquishment, we'll never move forward to embrace the new relationships God has for us.
Mary E. DeMuth
#26. The difficult art I was attempting had, indeed a powerful fascination, before which the past faded, the future receded, and the whole of experience narrowed down to this stretch of glancing, glimmering water, and the fly I was trying to cast across it.
Mary Stewart
#27. Each period of a civilisation creates an art that is specific in it and which we will never see reborn. To try and revive the principles of art of past centuries can lead only to the production of stillborn works.
Wassily Kandinsky
#28. How aware were photographers in the past of other visual arts? "No photographer of any distinction at all could approach his work without some awareness of what was going on in other visual media, and for that matter neither the painter nor the draughtsman could ignore photography."
Aaron Scharf
#29. When students have thanked me in the past for being their teacher, I have always felt that it was actually my love for the art of teaching they were speaking to.
Taylor Mali
#30. Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.
E. T. Bell
#31. We know that art is connected with the land, with its salt, with its smell, that outside of national culture there is no art. Cosmopolitanism - a world in which things lose their color and form, and words lose their significance. We love in our past all that we consider native, wonderful and fair.
Ilya Ehrenburg
#32. An educated person's ideas of Art are drwan naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends.
Oscar Wilde
#33. I'd been trained in the art of psychotherapy, the excavation of the past as a means of untangling the present and rendering it livable. It's detective work, of sorts, crouching stealthily in the blind alleys of the unconscious. (179)
Jonathan Kellerman
#34. The art of living ... is neither careless drifting on the one hand nor fearful clinging to the past on the other. It consists in being sensitive to each moment, in regarding it as utterly new and unique, in having the mind open and wholly receptive.
Alan W. Watts
#35. Art invites us to become explorers and excavators of our vast internal landscapes, discovering new terrain and digging deep into the past to unearth forgotten experiences and emotion.
Jaeda DeWalt
#36. Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#37. Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.
Camille Paglia
#38. My telephone calls and meetings and decisions were now parts of a prescribed ritual aimed at making peace with the past; his calls, his meetings and his decisions were already the ones that would shape America's future. (On transfer of power to Gerald R Ford)
Richard M. Nixon
#39. Valek leaned back in his chair and said to me, "I don't think I would have made it past the audition,Yelena. I probably would have set my hair on fire by this point."
"What's a singed head for the sake of art?" I teased. He laughed.
Maria V. Snyder
#40. Art in the twenty-first century may come to constitute a form of mediation between human and post-human consciousness, just as in past cultures it has been used to mediate between mankind and the gods.
Max More
#41. A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years, during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers.
Jerry Saltz
#42. Submitting to history allows us to remember our society's past. Although writing and art express history, it's our humanity which keeps all of us striving for an improved future.
K.P. Kollenborn
#43. HAIL HERMES! Mr. Lantiere has created something very special for all of us who love the history of mystery. The Magicician's Wand book opens doors to the past where we have an opportunity to explore the deeper meanings, myths and symbols of our art.
Jeff McBride
#44. Were I asked to define it, I should reply that archeology is that science which enables us to register and classify our knowledge of the sum of man's achievement in those arts and handicrafts whereby he has, in time past, signalized his passage from barbarism to civilization.
Amelia B. Edwards
#45. For ages past the Genius of Literature and the Genius of Art have walked together hand in hand. For the Goddess of letters is blind, and only she of Art can lend her sight.
Howard Pyle
#46. It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated, even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations, large paintings, and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.
Jerry Saltz
#47. The arts of Mexico are heavy with the weight of the past, of gods that demanded the sacrifice of a thousand beating hearts in a day, of a world that ended every fifty-two years, of warriors who rushed into battle wearing the heads of jaguars or clothed in the flayed skins of their human victims.
Biloine W. Young
#48. It would add much to human happiness, if an art could be taught of forgetting all of which the remembrance is at once useless and afflictive, that the mind might perform its functions without encumbrance, and the past might no longer encroach upon the present.
Samuel Johnson
#49. That doesn't mean that I would destroy those works, or that I'm not proud of having come out the other side. Our past art makes our present art as much as our past life makes us who we are now. In the end, if the art stands up, that's what matters.
Kat Howard
#50. In such a person, sadness breeds purpose; finding inspiration in the darkness and often times, I believe, they will impress a hell onto their own lives in order to re-create it, that others might suffer the experience from the comfort of their armchairs. - Quote from Her Past's Present.
Michael Poeltl
#51. If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.
Allan Nevins
#52. Great art does not break with the past. It breaks with the present by emulating the best of the past.
Walter Darby Bannard
#53. But now, the final feeling ... is one of gratitude that the journey was undertaken. Looking at the past has meant, for the first time, being able to let it go.
Ruth Cracknell
#54. Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years, art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors.
Jerry Saltz
#55. We cannot inherit a fixed, unmoving view of life and of art from the past generation.
Asger Jorn
#56. The art of living your life has a lot to do with getting over loss. The less the past haunts you, the better.
Richard Ford
#57. I have not attempted to try to relive or recreate the past; but I have sought guidance from those timeless elements in the past which remain valid and vital to the future ... The purpose of my art is to seek beauty and truth, and to explore and glorify the human being and the universe.
Frederick Hart
#58. I think Picasso was someone who took art's powers of consuming, its powers of much-ness and multiplicity, and used that to his fullest extent. That's something that was permitted to men, obviously, much more than women, but was also permitted in the past much more often than now.
Molly Crabapple
#59. I remember when I did 'Mrityudand' there was this big hoo-ha, and people were asking me why I was doing an art movie, and I would just tell them that, 'You know, what's the big deal, it's a movie.' I'm so glad that's a thing of the past.
Madhuri Dixit
#60. I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.
Walt Whitman
#61. That way of inspiration
is always open,
and open to everyone;
it acts as go-between, interpreter,
it explains symbols of the past
in to-day's imagery.
Hilda Doolittle
#62. A man's memory may almost become the art of continually varying and misrepresenting his past, according to his interest in the present.
George Santayana
#63. The importance of recovering the customs and the institutions of the past thus inaugurating the archaeological approach to art
Raja Ravi Varma
#64. The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.
Roland Barthes
#65. Efforts to revive the art principles of the past at best produce works of art that resemble a stillborn child.
Wassily Kandinsky
#66. The conventional notions of art have changed, and a lot of things done today are considered works of art that would have been rejected in the past.
David Rockefeller
#67. We also need to learn the art of letting go: of the past, of unresolved grievances, of our younger selves. Nobody gets out of here alive.
Gordon Livingston
#68. Why not say it? I'm bursting out of my cocoon. It was all too nice in the past - it never knocked anyone out. But last year ... my first opening night at the Met - I looked out and heard all that cheering ... for me ... And I loved it.
Benita Valente
#69. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity of morals and belief which seems so favorable to statesmanship and art; it ends by fighting suicidally in the lost cause of the past. For
Will Durant
#70. The love of art in its many forms lives on and enables us to enjoy the past, the present, and look with confidence to the future.
John Kurtz
#71. Imagination is nostalgia for the past, the absent it is the liquid solution in which art develops the snapshot of reality.
Cyril Connolly
#72. We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.
Terry Pratchett
#73. A wise architect observed that you could break the laws of architec75tural art provided you had mastered them first. That would apply to religion as well as to art. Ignorance of the past does not guarantee freedom from its imperfections.
Reinhold Niebuhr
#75. New York has never learnt the art of growing old by playing on all its pasts. Its present invents itself, from hour to hour, in the act of throwing away its previous accomplishments and challenging the future. A city composed of paroxysmal places in monumental reliefs.
Michel De Certeau
#76. But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.
Aldous Huxley
#77. No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.
Theodore Bikel
#78. In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles ... Contemporary or postmodernist art ... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past.
Fredric Jameson
#79. Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.
Anne Fortier
#80. And we may be led, then, upward through more
Powerful forms of poetry, past columns
With peeling posters on them, to the country of indifference.
Meanwhile if the swell diapasons, blooms
Unhappily and too soon, the little people are nonetheless real.
John Ashbery
#81. If art is to flourish in the twenty-first century, it must renew its moral authority by rededicating itself to life. It must be an enriching, ennobling and vital partner in the public pursuit of civilization. It should be a majestic presence in everyday life just as it was in the past.
Frederick Hart
#82. I think art can really serve to inspire a movement - and, of course, it has in the past. The Civil Rights movement wouldn't have the same resonance without the songs from everyone from Pete Seeger to Odetta to James Brown.
Saul Williams
#83. Courbet comes in 1849 with the intention of overthrowing past art and constructing it anew. While he speaks only of realism, of which he proclaims himself the messiah, his pictures show pre-eminently those qualities which are learned in the museums.
Jules Breton
#84. It takes more to make one sage today than it did to make the seven of Greece. And you need more resources to deal with a single person these days than with an entire nation in times past.
Baltasar Gracian
#85. Every person, if he is to have mental health and live successfully, must move away from past failures and mistakes and go forward without letting them be a weight upon him. The art of forgetting is absolutely necessary.
Norman Vincent Peale
#86. Story is the umbilical cord that connects us to the past, present, and future. Family. Story is a relationship between the teller and the listener, a responsibility ... Story is an affirmation of our ties to one another.
Terry Tempest Williams
#87. When I am asked what I believe in, I say that I believe in architecture. Architecture is the mother of the arts. I like to believe that architecture connects the present with the past and the tangible with the intangible.
Richard Meier
#88. If we learn the art of yielding what must be yielded to the changing present, we can save the best of the past.
Dean Acheson
#89. Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.
David Cronenberg
#90. Artists of today can be inspired by the past, but they have to apply present methods if they want a future in music.
Loren Weisman
#91. There's a lot of stuff that I've been through in my life in the past couple of months that I don't really want to share with people who are close to me, but I have no option if it's my art.
Zachary Cole Smith
#92. Be satisfied, and pleased with what thou art, Act cheerfully and well thou allotted part; Enjoy the present hour, be thankful for the past, And neither fear, nor wish, the approaches of the last.
Martial
#93. There are plenty of writers, past and present, from Shakespeare to Henry James to Lydia Davis, who test the limits of coherence and put pressure on current notions of accessible (and acceptable) narrative methods. To thrive and change and grow, any art needs this kind of pressure.
Joanna Scott
#94. Through depression and many other dark low emotions, our Light dims and our immune system declines along with it. White blood cells are the physical Light of our body.
Colors can be used to heal, restore and to uplift us.
Jacqueline Ripstein
#95. If we try to think back to the dim and distant past ... what is it that helps us reconstruct those times, and to picture the lives of those who lived in them? It is their art ... It is thanks to the hand, the companion of the mind, that civilization has arisen.
Maria Montessori
#96. Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is past; be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts, and awaken hope, that we may know thee as thou art revealed in Scripture and the breaking of bread. Grant this for the sake of thy love, amen.
Jan Karon
#97. One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.
Andy Goldsworthy
#98. Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.
Angela Carter
#99. Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.
Andre Malraux
#100. 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
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
