Top 100 Good Art Is Quotes
#1. Good art is always dangerous, always open-ended. Once you put it out in the world you lose control of it; people will fit it into their minds in all sorts of different ways.
Greil Marcus
#2. All good art is seditious, but the people in authority can never recognise it. I think when you mention sedition, artists are the ones whose eyes light up thinking, 'Oh, yes, I want some of that!'
Michael Leunig
#3. I like connecting with people, and that's what good art is: a point of connection. There's nothing better, on stage or on film.
Ruth Negga
#4. All good art is abstract in its structure.
Paul Strand
#5. Making art, good art, is always a struggle. It can make you happy when you pull it off. There's no better feeling. It's beauteous. But it's always about hard work and inspiration and sweat and good ideas.
Damien Hirst
#6. Good art is not universal. Bruce Willis is universal.
Sherman Alexie
#8. Good art is born from knowing yourself deeply: Your art cannot hide how much you have discovered about yourself.
Zhang Xiaogang
#9. Do you know what good art is? It is saying "ta" to God.
Stanley Spencer
#10. All good art is in the nature of a letter written to amuse a sick friend. Too much art, particularly in our time, is only a letter written to oneself.
W. H. Auden
#11. The mark of all good art is not that the thing done is done exactly or finely, for machinery may do as much, but that it is worked out with the head and the workman's heart.
Oscar Wilde
#12. Good art is in the wallet of the beholder.
Kathy Lette
#13. Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way to say what is not sayable.
Frederick Busch
#14. Good art is art that allows you to enter it from a variety of angles and to emerge with a variety of views.
Mary Schmich
#15. All good art is political. Between the lines of every book, the author implants messages for the unsuspecting reader. If not, what point does it serve?
Chloe Thurlow
#16. Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.
Damien Hirst
#17. All good art is about something deeper than it admits.
Roger Ebert
#19. Most good art is left wing. It's a moot point whether there is any good right-wing art.
Samuel West
#20. I think TV promulgates the idea that good art is just art which makes people like and depend on the vehicle that brings them the art.
David Foster Wallace
#21. Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.
C.S. Lewis
#23. This was never about the money ... Don't you understand? A world without good art is a far more dangerous place than one you don't get paid for making it in.
Dimitri Zaik
#24. Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God.
Patrick Swift
#25. In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people, ... [t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.:; 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.
George Orwell
#26. All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science.
Leslie Fiedler
#27. The highest and best work of imagination is the marvelous transformation that it works in character. Imagine that you are one with the principal of good, and you will become truly good.
Charles Fillmore
#28. One of the things that's good for me is that I can go from one art form to another.
Rebecca Miller
#29. I wonder a lot about making things meaningful. You want to do meaningful work and make art, but you're making records, which is good, but you don't want to weight them - it's a very curious thing.
Doseone
#31. There is no perception without memory. But good art surprise us. Good art reorients our expectations, forces us to break the pattern, to see in a new way.
Siri Hustvedt
#32. Troubadours travelled from town to town. They didn't really sing too good, which is the main reason they kept going.
Art Linkletter
#33. I think art is good at looking back and looking forward. I don't think art is good at looking head-on. At the end of the day, people are more important than paintings.
Damien Hirst
#35. Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
#36. I am of the opinion that the appreciation and the desire for what is good takes more study and insight than does the understanding and test for the best music and art.
Laurance Rockefeller
#37. Craft' gets a bad rap. Mediocre art is not caused by craft; it is caused by artists. Good art employs whatever craft works best.
Walter Darby Bannard
#38. O blessed bounty, giving ail content!
The only fautress of all noble arts
That lend'st success to every good intent.
A grace that rests in the most godlike hearts,
By heav'n to none but happy souls infus'd
Pity it is, that e'er thou wast abus'd.
Michael Drayton
#39. My individual power is limited. I want to use my high-profile way to wake people up to take action together to do good things. I can only awake them with my performance art and creativity.
Chen Guangbiao
#40. Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration ... tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils
Francis Bacon
#41. A man of talent is not born to be left to himself, but to devote himself to art and good masters who will make something of him.
Johann Peter Eckermann
#42. When a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also are inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to flee to the margins; it was ... this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.
Orhan Pamuk
#43. Good-breeding is not confined to externals, much less to any particular dress or attitude of the body; it is the art of pleasing, or contributing as much as possible to the ease and happiness of those with whom you converse.
Henry Fielding
#44. "Look into thy heart and write!" is good advice, but not if interpreted to mean, "Look nowhere else!" The poet should know his world and, so far as his art is concerned, any kind of battering from his world is better than his own self-indulgent brooding.
Harriet Monroe
#45. My position is that serious and good art has always existed to help, to serve, humanity. Not to indict. I don't see how art can be called art if its purpose is to frustrate humanity.
Chinua Achebe
#46. 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
#47. Art is always good. It just depends if you like or not.
Ziggy Marley
#48. 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
#50. It is a significant symbol that street art is gaining increased attention and credibility in the art world and that's a good thing.
Invader
#51. The attempt to divide art and politics is a bourgeois which says good poetry, art, cannot be political, but since everything is ... political, even an artist or work that claims not to have any politics is making a political statement by that act.
Amiri Baraka
#52. The art of conversation, or the qualification for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with a respect for the emergencies of the moment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#53. Cookery is a wholly unselfish art: as 'art for art's sake' it is unthinkable. A man may sing in his bath every morning without the least encouragement, but no cook can cook just for his or her own sake in a like manner. All good cooks, like all great artists, must have an audience worth cooking for.
Andre Simon
#54. The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.
Brian Eno
#55. 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
#56. I say that the art of sculpture is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing, because a statue has eight views and they must all be equally good.
Benvenuto Cellini
#57. Too much trouble,' 'Too expensive,' or 'Who will know the difference' are death knells for good food ... Cooking is not a particularly difficult art, and the more you cook and learn about cooking, the more sense it makes.
Julia Child
#58. I always give money to a sidewalk con if the story is a good one, even if I don't believe a word of it. Art deserves to get paid.
Luc Sante
#59. There are two dirty words in photography, one is art, the other is good taste
Helmut Newton
#60. Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Alice Walker
#61. No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it.
Frank Stella
#62. Do not fail, as you go on, to draw something every day, for no matter how little it is, it will be well worthwhile, and it will do you a world of good.
Cennino Cennini
#63. The kind of juvenile story I like best to write
and read, too, for the matter of that
is a good, jolly one, "art for art's sake," or rather "fun for fun's sake," with no insidious moral hidden away in it like a pill in a spoonful of jam!
L.M. Montgomery
#64. The art of living has no history: it does not evolve: the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it. Other pleasures come, which replace nothing. No progress in pleasures, nothing but mutations.
Roland Barthes
#65. There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.
Gustave Flaubert
#66. A theater is such a revealing form of art, such a transparent and good actors, they're such powerful individuals. I always kind of dreamt that one day I will open my mouth on stage.
Mikhail Baryshnikov
#67. The existence of good bad literature - the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously - is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
George Orwell
#68. Engineering problems are under-defined, there are many solutions, good, bad and indifferent. The art is to arrive at a good solution. This is a creative activity, involving imagination, intuition and deliberate choice.
Ove Arup
#70. What's nice about both clouds, and art, is that you can look at them and just resonate. That can be good for both the heart and the mind.
Ogden W. Rogers
#71. For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it.
Oscar Wilde
#72. But as a Scot with a lifelong love of Scotland and the arts, I believe the opportunity of independence is too good to miss. Simply put there is no more creative an act than creating a new nation.
Sean Connery
#73. In life and art we need to make sure that we honour that which our hearts and brains tell us is good. And we should cast a philosophic yet curious smile at that which our hearts and brains tell us otherwise.
Robert Genn
#74. 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
#75. There are some disabling myths about what art is, how to do it, what is good art, and what art is for, that have gagged generations, depriving them of significant and natural means of expression. This is a terrible loss and an unnecessary one.
Peter London
#76. Television as we have it isn't an art form - it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.
Pauline Kael
#77. Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.
Paul Hawken
#78. Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.
Robert Rauschenberg
#79. If you think art is a competitive forum, then you're going to stop doing it if you're not good. But if it's not competitive, it's something that you'll keep doing.
Zephyr Teachout
#80. Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.
Haruki Murakami
#81. Real art is basic emotion. If a scene is handled with simplicity - and I don't mean simple - it'll be good, and the public will know it.
John Wayne
#82. The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good.
Stanley Kubrick
#83. The straightforward manner is seldom equal to the complications of the good subject. There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.
Flannery O'Connor
#84. I see 30 to 40 gallery shows a week, and no matter what kind of mood I'm in, no matter how bad the art is, I almost always feel better afterward. I can learn as much from bad art as from good.
Jerry Saltz
#85. There can be no good art that is international. Art to be vigorous and gesund must use the material at hand.
Stevie Smith
#86. Train the body and develop stamina and endurance. But the spirit of competition and power that presides over them is not good, it reflects a distorted vision of life. The root of the martial arts is not there.
Taisen Deshimaru
#87. To me, the lasting impression of any good wine is the thought of its maker. Those whose efforts transformed the fruits of the soil into a finished work of art. Those who pulled from the hectic passage of time an ordered memory. They are immortalized by their wine in my glass.
Dave Chambers
#88. The good thing about being an artist, is it's a legitimate way of looking at things cross-eyed.
John Chamberlain
#89. Building a professional relationship on respect as opposed to affection is a very good idea. Running your art projects the way you'd run a dry-cleaning business is also a really good idea. You shouldn't go into work like you're going on a date, like you're hanging out with friends.
Penn Jillette
#90. In the end, we're just showmen. But, I think that it's an important factor. Not to be anything else but clear about that - for me, creativity is an important part of our evolution. Art has probably done more good for the world than war. But they're equally powerful. They both create revolutions.
Nicolas Winding Refn
#91. A good systems thinker, particularly in an organizational setting, is someone who can see four levels operating simultaneously: events, patterns of behavior, systems, and mental models.
Art Kleiner
#93. The role of a museum of modern art is to make a good selection and identify what we believe to be the coming movements, and that requires taste.
David Rockefeller
#94. All that matters on the stage is good art.
Jerzy Jeszke
#95. This is the theory ... that anything that is art ... is presumably about some certain thing, but is really always about something else, and it's no good having one without the other, because if you just have the something it is boring and if you just have the something else it's irritating.
Edward Gorey
#96. A good painter has two main objects to paint, man and the intention of his soul. The former is easy, the latter hard as he has to represent it by the attitude and movement of the limbs.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#97. Most people are not good people. In business, in art, in almost every 'world' I've been in, most people I've meet are pretty gray to black. It takes practice to be the person who is a source of compassion and honesty.
James Altucher
#98. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#99. A Good Relationship is like a neat and defined nail art. It requires a lot of concentration, time devotion and patience, to take it to perfection!
Mehek Bassi
#100. Knowing when you're not good at something and knowing when you are good at something is an art-form.
Glenda Bailey
