Top 100 Great Art Quotes
#1. This is what Great Art does. It becomes more real than the real, more true than the truth.
Cormac McCarthy
#2. Great art likes chains. The greatest artists have created art within bounds. Or else they have created their own chains.
Nadia Boulanger
#3. You don't have to have a great art idea - just get to work and something will happen. So that's pretty much my modus operandi and pretty much my principal position, such as it is.
Chuck Close
#4. Society is like a large piece of frozen water; and skating well is the great art of social life.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
#5. The pleasantest things in the world are pleasant thoughts, and the great art of life is to have as many of them as possible.
Michel De Montaigne
#6. It's rather like your voice. You put up with your voice and speak with it because you haven't any choice. But it's what you say that counts. It's what distinguishes all great art from the other kind.
John Fowles
#7. What makes for great art is the courage to speak and write and paint what you know and care about.
Audrey Flack
#8. Always keep your ego in check and not be afraid to listen. Listening is a great art form.
Clint Eastwood
#9. Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities
William T. Vollmann
#10. A proof of really great art is that it is generally true - it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.
Lafcadio Hearn
#11. One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions. It worked in the way that religion was supposed to, if you thought about it.
Nick Hornby
#12. Great Art is collaborative but not democratic. It's OK to be the boss
Jamie Catto
#13. In the last analysis, provincialism is your belief in yourself, in your neighborhood, in your reality. It is patriotism without belligerence. Convincing cases have been made to show that all great art is provincial in the sense of reflecting a place, a time, and a Zeitgeist.
Richard M. Weaver
#14. If Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the Great Art Form would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.
Harmony Korine
#15. Any good business person applies financial discipline to everything they do. The movie business is and should be no different; I don't believe you have to sacrifice creativity to have business success. To the contrary, great art requires discipline.
Paula Wagner
#16. Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth.
John Ruskin
#17. 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
#18. No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#19. Great art must not be sullied by politics. One would never, after all, seek to embellish the Mona Lisa, not even with a swastika.
Timur Vermes
#20. Self-censorship, whether known or unknown, is an unwelcome brake on creativity; it stifles self-expression and hence prevents a work from reaching the heights of great art.
Semir Zeki
#21. To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.
Herman Melville
#22. In war there is but one favorable moment; the great art is to seize it!
Napoleon Bonaparte
#23. I don't think there's any formula for what makes great art.
Maggie Nelson
#24. Of all the seasons, winter is the most conducive to the great art of dormancy. This art requires an appreciation of semi-consciousness: the beautiful and necessary prelude to sleep - a special pleasure in itself that is all too often neglected, under-valued or looked down upon.
Michael Leunig
#26. That amenity which the French have developed into a great art ... conversation.
Cornelia Otis Skinner
#27. Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!
Gene Wilder
#28. I grew up overseas in Indonesia, and my school had a great art, music, and theatre program.
Angela Kinsey
#29. Great art must be a living thing, or it is not art at all.
Bill Reid
#30. Never worry about being obsessive. I like obsessive people. Obsessive people make great art
Susan Sontag
#31. But shitty human beings sometimes make great art.
Jerry Heller
#32. People don't really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it.
Steven Moffat
#33. When we rejoice in beautiful scenery, great art, and great music, it is but the flexing of instincts acquired in another place and another time.
Neal A. Maxwell
#34. If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.
Pablo Picasso
#35. While great art makes you wonder, great design makes things clear.
John Maeda
#36. All great art is almost never received well initially; don't quit before the world opens its eyes.
Gregor Collins
#37. The development that produces great art is a moral and not an aesthetic development.
Patrick Swift
#38. That's what great art does - it inspires other artists to do great art, and that's what it should do.
Andrew Stanton
#39. All great art is the work of the whole living creature, body and soul, and chiefly of the soul.
John Ruskin
#40. The interpretation of dreams is a great art.
Paracelsus
#41. Art is incredibly subjective. What is great art to one person isn't necessarily to another.
Sara Blecher
#42. I think the key to great art and great artists is to just fully be yourself and not be scared of that, and be the extremes of your personality. Show the extremes of your personality and embrace the imperfections. Embrace the things about yourself that you might not like.
King Tuff
#43. Prayer is a fine, delicate instrument. To use it right is a great art, a holy art. There is perhaps no greater art than the art of prayer. Yet the least gifted, the uneducated and the poor can cultivate the holy art of prayer.
Ole Hallesby
#44. I used to think that great art happened without argument, and maybe that's not the case. Maybe the things that are most important in this life, you have to fight for.
Jon Foreman
#45. I think that great programming is not all that dissimilar to great art. Once you start thinking in concepts of programming it makes you a better person ... as does learning a foreign language, as does learning math, as does learning how to read.
Jack Dorsey
#46. There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.
Rebecca West
#47. The one great art is that of making a complete human being of oneself.
G.I. Gurdjieff
#48. From personal adversity comes great art
Tan Redding
#49. What underlies great science is what underlies great art, whether it is visual or written, and that is the ability to distinguish patterns out of chaos.
Diana Gabaldon
#50. All great art commences with a vision, and perhaps it may be that the vision is closer to God than that which is ultimately created by the artist's brush. There will always be human flaws in the execution. Only in the mind can the artist achieve true perfection.
John Connolly
#51. All great art is born of the metropolis.
Ezra Pound
#52. Great art has dreadful manners. The greatest paintings grab you in a headlock, rough up your composure, and then proceed in short order to re-arrange your reality.
Simon Schama
#53. People will still make great art, but I think it's good to assume you will always be a failure. People were believing the opposite.
Wade Guyton
#54. I felt the unmistakable certainty that I had been in the presence of great art, and that my heart had opened in reply.
Andy Miller
#55. I think great art is always ambiguous and can't be pinned down.
Stephen Rea
#56. Like great art, something essential dies when great jokes are explained. So what's the key to telling a good joke/creating great art timing.
Travis Nichols
#57. It is by studying little things, that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.
Gretchen Rubin
#58. The great art of writing is knowing when to stop.
Josh Billings
#61. There are evidences of a very great art in Europe as long as twenty-five thousand years ago, and in Egypt as far back as sixty thousand years. Money had nothing to to do with the production of these treasures. Money will have nothing to do with the art of the future.
Henry Miller
#62. Great art does not break with the past. It breaks with the present by emulating the best of the past.
Walter Darby Bannard
#65. Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.
Edward Hopper
#66. The experiential test of whether this art is great or good, or minor or abysmal is the effect it has on your own sense of the world and of yourself. Great art changes you.
Wendy Beckett
#67. I think impersonation is a great art. It's something that I enjoy doing, in a frivolous and lighthearted way. But I don't flatter myself to think I'm an impersonator.
Andrea Riseborough
#68. the object of all great art is beauty, and it makes us nostalgic for God. Whether we consider ourselves people of faith or not, art arouses in us what the pope calls a 'universal desire for redemption.
Ian Morgan Cron
#69. Great art makes of a cosmos one simple droplet, by which the world is slaked of a thirst it never knew it had.
Aldous Richards
A.H. Richards
#70. Once people have seen four or five Henry Moores, they will have a sense of great art.
Bess Myerson
#71. A lot of great art comes from the Afro-American male experience. Black men are geniuses, and many times their desperation, their position as being pariahs, leads them to great originality.
Ishmael Reed
#72. Seventy-five percent of great art is hard work only about twenty-five percent is great talent.
Lee Strasberg
#74. It is the nature of carnivores to get power and then, having disposed of their enemies, to deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make themselves look like herbivores.
Robert Hughes
#75. It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.
Henry Louis Gates
#76. Simplicity, clarity, singleness: These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation.
Richard Holloway
#77. Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.
Edith Hamilton
#78. You know that bad people can make great art, don't you?'Said Annie.
'Yes, of course. Some of the people whose art I admire the most are assholes.'
'Dickens wasn't nice to his wife.'
'Dickens didn't make a memoir called I'm Nice to My Wife.
Nick Hornby
#80. Great art should be shown with great excitement.
Thomas Hoving
#81. Ill-informed intuition is fantastic - it's what great art is. So really old painters or writers or actors are brilliant, because they've finally reached the point when they can let go of al technique.
Helen Mirren
#82. Great art allows you to transcend your mortal frame and to reach for the stars. I think great science does the same thing.
Vilayanur S. Ramachandran
#84. Books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it's full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.
John Leonard
#85. If you're going to make great art, you have to make it at a huge cost - you have to be prepared to sacrifice what other people think of you, other people's opinions, and you have to make personal sacrifices.
Romola Garai
#86. Most great art is freedom within form. Without form, we are amateurs, without freedom, we are robots.
Donald Miller
#87. All great art contains at its center contemplation, a dynamic contemplation.
Susan Sontag
#88. For millennia our suffering has been the forge in which great art has been made and great lives have been lived.
David DuChemin
#89. We will never get great art from women if their education exposes them only to the second-rate and if the idea of greatness itself is denied. Greatness is not a white male trick. Every important world civilization has defined its artistic tradition in elitist terms of distinction and excellence.
Camille Paglia
#90. All great art is revolutionary because it touches upon the reality of man and questions the reality of the various transitory forms of human society.
Eric Hoffer
#91. I honestly think that's one of the greatest motivators of art - the fear of not making great art.
Jason McCoy
#93. Great art is always a balancing act. But all art has both - an emotional content and an intellectual content.
George L. Carlson
#94. I love what Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh and Jesus all said - that love is really the driving principle of the creative act. In fact, they would say that great art is always inspired by love.
Erwin McManus
#95. All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.
Dorothy Thompson
#96. I think that all great art never strives to answer any questions; it just asks the appropriate ones at the appropriate time.
Rhys Ifans
#97. To be great, art has to point somewhere.
Anne Lamott
#98. You've really got to get down on the floor with yourself and get low in order to make great art. I think you've just got to accept who you are and do the most unbelievable things.
Damien Hirst
#99. Grievance does not make for great art.
Eva Figes
#100. Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.
W. H. Auden
