Top 100 For Art Quotes
#1. Nature and abstract forms are both materials for art, and the choice of one or the other flows from historically changing interests.
Meyer Schapiro
#2. I could say diamonds are a girl's best friend, and that never changes. But the taste for art did change.
Susan Vreeland
#3. Lee explained to her that art for art's sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can't be living a life driven by need and desire.
Nell Zink
#4. I also had a tremendous passion for art and read a lot.
Nigel Dennis
#5. Somehow, the whole idea of me writing art reviews was just too much of a complicated thought, but I liked art, and later on I just realized that it would be perhaps a pleasure, and so I decided to do it for 'Art in America' - a lot.
Eileen Myles
#6. A king-size bed sat catty-corner opposite me. The bedroom was painted white, but the comforter was crimson. Small black velvet bird appliques swarmed in the center. I'm not much for art. I'll confess the deeper meaning of the twisted comforter was lost on me. Maybe death to all swallows?
Hailey Edwards
#8. I've always thought that there shouldn't be any limit to the things that are well designed. And I think that people who consider that art should only be kept for art galleries and doesn't have a role in public life, I think that's too narrow.
Ken Done
#10. If [modern artists] hadn't lobbied for endless subsidies, they would have starved or been forced to go to work long ago. Because the ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for 'art' that leaves him unmoved.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#11. I thought every person should live for art, not just me, and furthermore, why would I want to be normal? Why would I want to be stupid like everyone else?
Rabih Alameddine
#12. No generation is interested in art in quite the same way as any other; each generation, like each individual, brings to the contemplation of art its own categories of appreciation, makes its own demands upon art, and has its own uses for art.
T. S. Eliot
#14. I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste.
Jerry Saltz
#15. We're a depraved civilization. All this technology, all the computer games and the iPhones ... nobody will sit for art anymore. What a dismaying state of humanity.
Diane Paulus
#17. Art for art's sake, money for God's sake.
Simon Raven
#18. The novel ... creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.
V.S. Pritchett
#19. Mozart and Neil Diamond may have begun with the same idea, but that a work of art is more than an idea is confirmed by the difference between the 'Soave sia il vento' and 'Kentucky Woman.' We have different words for 'art' and 'idea' because they are two different things.
Mark Helprin
#20. As an architect, you have to provide a shelter to enjoy art. And you have to love art. It's like when you make a concert hall. You must love music. This is the reason why you make the space, to enjoy music - making a space for art is the same thing.
Renzo Piano
#21. Art for Art's Sake is for the well fed. The well fed are all the babies in cradles and my kitty along with them, and I am happy if my writings are for my kitty.
Lara Biyuts
#22. Some men's passion is for gold. some men's passion is for art. some men's passion is for fame. my passion is for souls
William Booth
#23. Ruskin's concern for art education applied to the development of the power of the hand and eye for everyone.
Robert Hewison
#24. I thought you were supposed to destroy yourself for art.
Edward Field
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. There is this presumption, in those who feel destined for art and above all literature: we act as if we had received an investiture, but in fact no one has invested us with anything, it is we who have authorized ourselves to be authors.
Elena Ferrante
#28. I was at the Royal Art School. That was a preparatory school specially for art teachers. You see, it was not so much for the development of artists. But we had there terribly stiff training.
Josef Albers
#29. It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake.
D.H. Lawrence
#30. The passion for art is, as for believers, very religious. It unites people, its message is of common humanity. Art has become my religion - others pray in church. It's a banality, but you don't possess art, it possesses you. It's like falling in love.
Francois Pinault
#31. I say 'art' advisedly, for art is undefined, undefinable, and without limits. I can use the word without fear of misusing it, for it has no exact meaning. There are as many meanings as there are artists.
Robert A. Heinlein
#32. At times such as this, it becomes more important for art to survive.
Jennifer Niven
#33. The main thing for inner contentment is to be in a state of grace. And there is an artistic state of grace, for art is a kind of religion.
Georges Rodenbach
#34. Strictly speaking, there are no holidays for art; art pursues you everywhere, and that's just fine with the artist.
Elfriede Jelinek
#35. Art for art's sake, and creation for creation's sake, and love for love's sake
Rajneesh
#36. I have always been interested in art but had no formal training or experience. It's always been just what I liked, my eye for art.
Britt Robertson
#37. For art to be reality, the whole sensuous being must be caught up in the experience.
Margaret Mead
#39. It is not so for art in appreciation because art is concerned with human behavior. And science is concerned with the behavior of metal or energy. It depends on what the fashion is. Now today it's energy. It's the same soul behind it. The same soul, you see.
Josef Albers
#40. I don't dare postulate about science, but I know that it takes both emotion and intellect in order for art to happen.
Lukas Foss
#41. Nothing's better for art than a little old-fashioned suffering.
J.C. Lillis
#42. Making of poetry, music, dance and art as culture-making in the service of nation-making. You can find writings that make that purpose for art quite explicit.
Mark McMorris
#43. For art and joy go together, with bold openness, and high head, and ready hand - fearing naught and dreading no exposure.
James Whistler
#44. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.
Susan Sontag
#45. Detective stories are the art-for-art's sake of yawning Philistinism.
V.S. Pritchett
#46. If I stop being on good behaviour for a moment, my dark little secret is that I don't actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art and simply cannot tell a good artist from a weak one, until the artist has enjoyed the validation of others - a received pronunciation.
Charles Saatchi
#47. The China Rich seem to be spending on a scale that's just beyond anything we've ever seen before. They are building and buying an insane amount of luxury residences around the world, commissioning huge flying palaces from Boeing, and paying ridiculous amounts for art.
Kevin Kwan
#48. The ordinary bloke will not voluntarily pay for "art" that leaves him unmoved
if he does pay for it, the money has to be conned out of him, by taxes and such.
Robert A. Heinlein
#49. There's a reason for Art Garfunkel's oddly shaped hair. It hides a very big brain.
Shawn Amos
#50. The real question is what to live for. And I can't answer it. Except another one of your records. And another chance for me to write. Art for art's sake, corny as that sounds.
Lester Bangs
#51. I am all for art's finding a large audience. But the way that's happening now, with big works filling big galleries and bigger shows, is mostly stopping statements from being made. Or heard. Or talked about. Or really examined. It's watering things down.
Jerry Saltz
#52. It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself.
Henry David Thoreau
#53. What is bad for the heart is good for art. The terrible irony of our lives as artists.
Jandy Nelson
#54. My dark little secret is that I don't actually believe many people in the art world have much feeling for art.
Charles Saatchi
#55. I mean, art for art's sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one's needs.
Carl Andre
#56. Not just art for art's sake, but I want to have films out there that will provoke authentic, holistic conversations about the human condition. And not provide the easy answers, but put it out there.
Isaiah Washington
#57. For art is about desire, is it not, and never its consummation?
A. Manette Ansay
#59. I always thought writing was the foundation and the basis for journalism in the same way being able to draw is the foundation for art.
Bob Schieffer
#60. There is no art in turning a goddess into a witch, a virgin into a whore, but the opposite operation, to give dignity to what has been scorned, to make the degraded disireable, that calls for art or for character
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#61. We need to make sure that there's art in the school. Why? Why should art be in the school? Because if art isn't in a school, then a guy like Steve Jobs doesn't get a chance to really express himself because in order for art to meet technology, you need art.
LL Cool J
#62. If it were not for art, I would have killed myself a long time ago,
Yayoi Kusama
#63. Is there no room for art in the spoken language? What is the use of creating an unnatural language to the exclusion of the natural one?
Swami Vivekananda
#64. The syllogism art for art's sake refers to that kind of painting which disregards, or is contrary to, public taste.
Walter J. Phillips
#65. If we understood the enigmas of life there would be no need for art.
Albert Camus
#66. Film has become a marketed commodity, and the opportunities and audiences for art cinema have grown smaller. There is a general downturn in cultural literacy, perhaps because of television.
Roger Ebert
#67. I just had to be strong enough to allow myself to be vulnerable. Great Lesson. For art and for life.
Jane Lynch
#68. As I grew older, I developed a very innate passion for art. I was actually pretty good at it.
Evangeline Lilly
#69. At the age when other children, I imagine, experience their first 'feeling' for a person, or for art, or for religion, I was affectionate, good, and even pious: by that I mean that under the influence of my mother, I was devoted to the Child Jesus.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#70. He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars; General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite and flatterer: For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.
William Blake
#71. A gypsy girl approached Don Zana and Alfanhui and held out her tambourine. Don Zana said to her, 'You don't pay for art, kid.
Rafael Sanchez Ferlosio
#72. Man's need for art is absolutely primordial, as strong as, and perhaps stronger than, our need for bread. Without bread, we die of hunger, but without art we die of boredom.
Jean Dubuffet
#73. If it be knowledge or wisdom one is seeking, then one had better go direct to the source. And the source is not the scholar or philosopher, not the master, saint, or teacher, but life itself - direct experience of life. The same is true for art. Here, too, we an dispense with the masters.
Henry Miller
#74. Then down came the lid
the day was lost, for art, at Sarajevo. World-politics stepped in, and a war was started which has not ended yet: a "war to end war." But it merely ended art. It did not end war.
Wyndham Lewis
#75. I never drew a picture of anything that was before me but always from fancy, a sure sign of the absence of artistic eyesight; and I illustrated my lack of real feeling for art by a very early speech: 'Mama,' said I, 'I have drawed a man. Shall I draw his soul now?
Robert Louis Stevenson
#76. Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. (1804)
Benjamin Constant
#77. It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics.
Leon Trotsky
#78. Most museums in Moscow, like Tretyakov, were established by philanthropists, whose passion for art allowed the development of culture on many levels.
Dasha Zhukova
#79. Too many young painters of the day work for the crowd, and not for art. But, then, should not the painters of the day work for the education of the crowd?
M. E. W. Sherwood
#80. I had, as I told you, a great passion while still almost a child. When it was over, I divided myself in two, placing on one side the soul I kept for Art, and on the other, my body, which would have to fend for itself.
Gustave Flaubert
#81. It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art. I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art. Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art.
Robert Rauschenberg
#82. I don't have any other skills. Some artists say that to mean that their embodied passion for art gave them no choice. I say it, very specifically, to say that I really didn't have any other options.
Rashid Johnson
#83. For me, being an artist with a high profile is a good thing for art.
Tracey Emin
#85. The real artist has no idea that he is sacrificing himself for art. He does what he does for one reason and one reason only-he can't help doing it.
Alma Gluck
#86. Among the language of the American Indians, there is no word for 'art' ... For Indians, everything is art ... therefore needs no name.
Jamake Highwater
#87. The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before,
Carl Sagan
#88. Art is a spiritual practice. If it weren't for art, I'd have given up on God a long time ago. This cathedral though....is very convincing.
Janice Macleod
#89. There's danger in glorifying negative emotions as fuel for art.
Tavi Gevinson
#90. My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.
Clara Schumann
#91. I never went to school for art or was told what to like or when. So every day is a learning process, like most of life.
Leo Fitzpatrick
#92. How come we have money to kill but no money to feed or heal? How come we have money to destroy but no money for art and schools? The
Eve Ensler
#93. A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.
Charles Baudelaire
#94. You must thank the gods for art, those of us who have been fortunate enough to stumble onto this means of venting our craziness, our meanness, our towering disgust.
Robert Crumb
#95. For Art may err, but Nature cannot miss.
John Dryden
#96. Too much thought is bad for the soul, for art, and for crime. It is also a sign of middle age.
Patrick Hamilton
#97. One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion.
Richard Wagner
#98. You can't dance cheerfully. Dancing is too important. It can be wild or solemn or gay or lewd or art for art's sake, but it can't be cheerful.
Rex Stout
#99. The student who deceives himself into thinking that he is giving his life like an ascetic in the spirit of sacrifice for art, is the victim of a deplorable species of egotism.
Alma Gluck
#100. Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of truth, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.
George Sand
