Top 100 Fine Art Sayings
#1. In England, pop art and fine art stand resolutely back to back.
Colin MacInnes
#2. Do not trust anybody but yourself. If people want to help you, fine. Put it on paper and understand exactly what every word says.
Art Alexakis
#3. Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
Laurence J. Peter
#4. Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.
Ralph Bakshi
#5. Wheels of justice grind slow but grind fine
Sun Tzu
#6. Initially I explored the tension between illustration and fine art when I first encountered miniature painting in my late teens. Championing the formal aspects of the Indo-Persian miniature-painting genre has often been at the core of my practice.
Shahzia Sikander
#7. Sunday night meant, in the dark, wintry, rainy Midlands ... anywhere where two creatures might stand and squeeze together and spoon ... Spooning was a fine art, whereas kissing and cuddling are calf-processes.
D.H. Lawrence
#8. Money, thou bane of bliss, and source of woe,
Whence cam'st thou, that thou art so fresh and fine?
I know thy parentage is base and low:
Man found thee poor and dirty in a mine.
George Herbert
#9. And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art.
Neil Gaiman
#10. The art of injudicious reading, the art of miscellaneous reading which every normal man ought to cultivate, is a very fine and satisfactory art; for the best guide to books is a book itself. It clasps hands with a thousand other books.
Maurice Francis Egan
#11. Hopefully if you create something fine, people will relate to it, so you're communicating with people, and you're not in a void. On the other hand, because you're always creating and transforming, art always separates you - always.
Patti Smith
#12. If you do not start with the idea, you are creating fine art - its personal, but it tends not to communicate.
Seymour Chwast
#13. I was a child of a single mother/art teacher, and a father who was an architect, so I've always been around the combination of art, fine art, and architecture my entire life.
James Pearse Connelly
#14. Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments.
Beatrice Warde
#15. A very fine artist can take something quite ordinary and, through sheer artistry and willpower, turn it into a work of art.
Truman Capote
#16. I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'
Friedrich Nietzsche
#17. Be true to yourself.
Make each day your masterpiece.
Help others.
Drink deeply from good books.
Make friendship a fine art.
Build a shelter against a rainy day.
Pray for guidance and give thanks for your blessings every day.
John Wooden
#18. Getting married is easy. Staying married is more difficult. Staying happily married for a lifetime is among the fine arts.
Roberta Flack
#19. A general definition of civilization: a civilized society is exhibiting the fine qualities of truth, beauty, adventure, art, peace.
Alfred North Whitehead
#20. I believe that architects should design gardens to be used, as much as the houses they build, to develop a sense of beauty and the taste and inclination toward the fine arts and other spiritual values.
Luis Barragan
#21. It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine
something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.
George Eliot
#22. 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
#23. I am lucky because I do fine art, and that is half of my living. And then illustration provides the other half.
Molly Crabapple
#24. Food, she decided, was like performance rather than fine art: its power was in its transience and immediacy.
Hannah Mary Rothschild
#25. And this is the origin of pop music: it's a professional music which draws upon both folk music and fine arts music as well.
Pete Seeger
#27. I have spent my life paying attention to my art form, developing my art form, worrying about my show and what I'm bringing to people, making sure that I give them a fine trade.
Gallagher
#28. 'The Next Wave' started as a drawing for a new silkscreen fine art print. I ended up doing the prints digitally because the water-based inks were better for the environment than the oil based inks. So, I learned about the Epson digital printers to get the image I wanted.
John Van Hamersveld
#29. I consider writing as a fine art. We kill it by imposing the alphabet on little children and making it the beginning of learning.
Mahatma Gandhi
#30. It is important to admit your mistakes, and to do so before you are charged with them. Many clients are surrounded by buckpassers who make a fine art of blaming the agency for their own failures. I seize the earliest opportunity to assume the blame.
David Ogilvy
#32. I'd like to see the comics' style expanded. I'd like to see artists synthesize traditional comics arts style with fine-arts styles or whatever. I like to see innovation. I don't like it when an art form becomes stagnant.
Harvey Pekar
#33. Our best teachers do more than impart facts and figures - they inspire and encourage students and instill a true desire to learn. That's a fine art in itself.
Sonny Perdue
#34. Anything I learned about the fine art of acting I learned from Hugo.
Cleo Moore
#35. There's a fine line between minimalism and not trying very hard.
Tom Pappalardo
#36. How often we have had cause to regret that the histrionic art, of all the fine arts the most intense in its immediate effect, should be, of all others, the most transient in its result! - and the only memorials it can leave behind, at best, so imperfect and so unsatisfactory!
Anna Brownell Jameson
#37. In the fine arts, as in many other things, we know well only what we have not learned.
Nicolas Chamfort
#38. Ornamentation is the principal part of architecture, considered as a subject of fine art.
John Ruskin
#39. My family always encouraged my drawing ability. Kids in school who teased me about my reading would get out of their seats and stand behind my desk as I worked and go, 'Wow, you can really draw.' Later, I earned a degree in Fine Art and got a Ph.D. in Art History.
Patricia Polacco
#40. The fine art of preparing sushi is something that you watch and learn.
Nobu Matsuhisa
#41. Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.
Edmund Clarence Stedman
#42. The audience for comics has shifted dramatically. And the boundaries between books and fine arts have blurred. Maybe it's the globalization of fine art through the Internet - it's easy for certain groups to coalesce around a certain kind of work or medium.
Shaun Tan
#43. Thou art moist and soft clay; thou must instantly be shaped by the glowing wheel.
[Lat., Udum et molle lutum es: nunc, nunc properandus et acri
Fingendus sine fine rota.]
Aulus Persius Flaccus
#44. Art is not arbitrary. A fine painting is not there by accident; it is not arrived at by chance. We are sensitive to tonalities.
Frederick Sommer
#45. Homer is one of the men of genius who solve that fine problem of art - the finest of all, perhaps - truly to depict humanity by the enlargement of man: that is, to generate the real in the ideal.
Victor Hugo
#46. The problem with fine art is that in most cases people have to make a special excursion to go and look at it: they can't afford to own it. So it isn't really part of their life in the way that music can be.
Brian Eno
#47. The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die.
Thomas Carlyle
#48. I'd like for people to be able to go to the universities and get a degree in fine arts-gastronomy.
Julia Child
#49. It takes intelligence and training, self-discipline and fine-sensibility, to gain renewed life through leisure occupation. America now suffers spiritual poverty, and art must become more fully American life before her leisure can become culture.
Hans Hofmann
#50. I like the idea of my art being a covetable object; I like preciousness. A lot of art seems to flaunt its throw-away character ... But you have to sail out into the dangerous sea of fine art with these crafted works.
Grayson Perry
#51. The Fine Arts are five in number: Painting, Music, Poetry, Sculpture, and Architecture--whereof the principle branch is Confectionery.
Marie-Antoine Careme
#52. The mother of useful arts is necessity; that of the fine arts is luxury. For father the former has intellect; the latter genius, which itself is a kind of luxury.
Arthur Schopenhauer
#53. A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#54. I think that those of us who are what are called intellectuals make a terrible mistake in overvaluing the yen we have for the arts, books, etc. There is a sweet, fine quality in life that has nothing to do with this, and more and more I find myself valuing myself with those people.
Sherwood Anderson
#55. A fine memoir is to a fine novel as a well-wrought blanket is to a fancifully embroidered patchwork quilt. The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape. Fiction has no practical purpose. Fiction, after all, is art.
Julia Glass
#56. One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#57. Entering into the spirit of this interior, you will discover the best possible atmosphere in which to show fine paintings or listen to music. It is this atmosphere that seems to me most lacking in our art galleries, museums, music halls and theaters.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#58. Exposure to the reproductions [of Corbis-owned fine art photographs] is likely to increase rather than diminish reverence for the real art and encourage more people to get out to museums and galleries.
Bill Gates
#59. I'm right now standing inside Hamilton-Selway Fine Art as an artist, as a philanthropist, as a child of God, and more importantly as a human being.
Steven Jackson
#60. All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.
Havelock Ellis
#61. Art lies in the fine choice. The artist does not teach us to see facts: he teaches us to feel harmonies.
Arthur Wesley Dow
#62. Tiger Woods is like a piece of fine art that belongs in the Louvre, and so, too, is Scott Medlock's painting of Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia ... a true masterpiece!
Al Michaels
#63. The shaping of taste is essentially the science of merchandising, whether of detergents or cars or books or objects of fine and decorative art.
Russell Lynes
#64. Cruelty, as a fine art, has attained its perfect flower in the trained-animal world.
Jack London
#65. If some of the greats had followed the traditional ways we would be missing so much fine art.
Gene Black
#66. It's not the scar and it's abso-freakin-lutely not you."
I dropped my hand. "Yeah, right." I sagged against him a little. For being as little as he is, Frankie's really solid. "It's never me."
I felt his sigh against my shoulder blades.
Melissa Jensen
#67. I know from grim experience that there is a beauty to her inner layers, too. Marvels of symmetry and craftsmanship sealed away inside her like the jewelled movements of a timepiece, fine works of art never meant to be seen.
Isaac Marion
#68. I want to make it clear: it's not that I hate mainstream cinema. It's perfectly fine. There are a lot of people who need to escape, because they are in very difficult situations, so they have the right to escape from the world. But this has nothing to do with an art form.
Michael Haneke
#69. I was a fine arts major in college, and a painter for many years. And I found that, like writing, art is very similar.
Kami Garcia
#70. A creative life is an amplified life. It's a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life, and a hell of a lot more interesting life. Living in this manner - continually and stubbornly bringing forth the jewels that are hidden within you - is a fine art, in and of itself.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#71. I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.
Bill Griffith
#72. Fine art is something wonderful that's left long into the future ... eternal beauty.
Masashi Kishimoto
#73. Let us practice the fine art of making every work a priestly ministration. Let us believe that God is in all our simple deeds and learn to find Him there.
A.W. Tozer
#74. Making good wine is a skill; making fine wine is an art.
Robert Mondavi
#75. One has complexes. One has the art complex. One goes to the School of Fine Arts and catches the complexes.
Jean Tinguely
#76. I take pleasure in working with the non-art photographs that reside in public archives, essentially authorless and owned by the world itself, because I find the world of fine art photography to be pretty silly and pretentious.
Michael Light
#77. Painting is a fine art: not merely because it gives us trees and faces and lovely things to see, but because paint is a finely tuned antenna, reacting to very unnoticed movement of the painter's hand, fixing the faintest shadow of a thought in color and texture.
James Elkins
#78. As in the fine arts, the progress of mankind from barbarism to civilisation is marked by a gradual succession of triumphs over the rude materialities of nature, so in the art of cookery is the progress gradual from the earliest and simplest modes, to those of the most complicated and refined.
Isabella Beeton
#79. A fine remedy for our anxieties over our low status in society may be to travel - whether literally or figuratively, by viewing works of art - through the gigantic spaces of the world.
Alain De Botton
#80. Above all, the photographs I use are not arty in any sense of the word. I think photography is dead as fine art; its only place is in the commercial world, for technical or information purposes.
Edward Ruscha
#81. The best teachers, one hopes, don't shout at their students - because they are skilled at wooing as well as demanding the best efforts of others. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, this wooing was a sufficiently fine art in itself to be the central focus of education.
Tom Chatfield
#82. 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
#83. My goal is to make fine art, and fine art comes from the soul. If you have virtuosity and facility, you can take and create something of significance.
Richard MacDonald
#84. I especially love all the instruments of art: inks, pens, paintbrushes, watercolors and oils, fine papers and canvases, and although I love to mess around with these tools and objects, I have minimal artistic skills.
Sharon Creech
#85. No apprenticeship has ever been thought necessary to qualify for husbandry, the great trade of the country. After what are called the fine arts, and the liberal professions, however, there is perhaps no trade which requires so great a variety of knowledge and experience.
Adam Smith
#86. I take the horsemanship very seriously and I treat it with the same integrity that one would any of the fine arts.
Buck Brannaman
#87. No performance is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy goods called fine arts and philosophy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#89. What are you doing with the child?" I inquired cautiously.
"I'm teachin' young James here the fine art of not pissing on his feet," he explained.
Diana Gabaldon
#90. The fine art of restraint, timely practised, is too beautiful, to go against.
Kamini Arichandran
#91. Doing fine, thank you, I would say, never knowing how to talk about what I do. If I could talk about it, I would not have to do it. I make art, sometimes I make true art, and sometimes it fills the empty places in my heart. Some of them. Not all.
Neil Gaiman
#92. Being a parent is not just about how you treat your child; it's also about how you treat the other parent. If you treat that person with respect, that's fine, that's the way to go. But if you don't, you're not being the parent you could be.
Art Alexakis
#93. To love the game itself is a fine thing; it is loving the art you live by.
Walter Tevis
#94. I always feel that art springs more from dirt than from fine intentions: given the choice, I put my trust in dirt.
Anthony Weller
#95. It is a fine art because it strives for an ideal, not only in plastic but also in lyrical respect.
August Bournonville
#96. In the history of mankind, the fine art of killing one another in a civilized and uniformed manner has been elusive.
Richard Marsden
#97. Anyone who knew the recipe of the alchemists could make gold, but only the artisans of Murano could make glass so fine, one could nearly touch one's fingers together on either side; cristallo without an imperfection or blemish, clear as the sky, with a sparkle to rival that of diamonds.
Ruth Nestvold
#98. There is a lightness about the feminine mind
a touch and go
music, the fine arts, that kind of thing
they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know.
George Eliot
#99. Difference making, by its very nature, is the art of taking something good and making it better. It's an act of fine-tuning, improving, and refining, not starting from zero.
David Sturt
#100. The art of holding on to money is all about saying no to consumer culture. Saying no to takeout, $4 lattes, and that shiny new computer when the old one still works fine.
Austin Kleon
