Top 100 Greatest Art Quotes
#1. It has been a sort of maxim, that the greatest art is to conceal art; but I know not how, among some people we meet with, their greatest cunning is to appear cunning.
Richard Steele
#2. I'm making some of the greatest art being made now. It'll take the art world ten years to get around to it.
Jeff Koons
#3. Fascism is fundamentally and at bottom an aesthetic conception, and ... it is your function as creators of beautiful things to portray with the greatest efficacy the sublime beauty and inevitable reality of the Fascist ideal.
Louis De Bernieres
#4. Aristotle was the first accurate critic and truest judge nay, the greatest philosopher the world ever had; for he noted the vices of all knowledges, in all creatures, and out of many men's perfections in a science he formed still one Art.
Ben Jonson
#5. The greatest foe to art is luxury, art cannot live in its atmosphere.
William Morris
#6. Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.
Jean Douchet
#7. The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.
Michelangelo
#8. If every museum in the New World were emptied, if every famous building in the Old World were destroyed and only Venice saved, there would be enough there to fill a full lifetime with delight. Venice, with all its complexity and variety, is in itself the greatest surviving work of art in the world.
Evelyn Waugh
#9. You were programmed to deliver a message, and the creation of that message is your greatest art. What is the message? Your life.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
#10. New York City is one of the greatest places on the planet. You have the best in food, art, theatre, and definitely people-watching.
Matt Bomer
#11. Art cannot be separated from life. It is the expression of the greatest need of which life is capable, and we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life's experience.
Robert Henri
#12. The greatest danger in art is too much knowledge.
Andre Derain
#13. Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.
Martin Luther
#14. The greatest art is to sit, and wait, and let it come.
Yogi Bhajan
#15. Life is the greatest art of all, and the master artist is the man who is living the beautiful life.
John Edgar Park
#16. Where art is concerned, it is the process of creating - exploring, discovering, and experimenting
that has the greatest value. Through self-expression and creativity, children's skills will develop naturally, and their ability to create will soar.
MaryAnn F. Kohl
#17. The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
Alain De Botton
#18. There is a constant ebb and flow in art historical reputations. The reputation of even the greatest figures like Picasso are in flux.
Jeffrey Deitch
#19. War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.
Richard Flanagan
#20. The greatest artists have never been men of taste. By never sophisticating their instincts they have never lost the awareness of the great simplicities, which they relish both from appetite and from the challenge these offer to skill in competition with popular art.
Jacques Barzun
#21. And above all you ought to guard against leading an army to fight which is afraid or which is not confident of victory. For the greatest sign of an impending loss is when one does not believe one can win.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#22. To give generously but appropriately and then, most difficult of all, and as the full apotheosis of the art, with feeling, in the moment and spontaneously, has always been recognized as one of the greatest of human qualities.
David Whyte
#23. One of the greatest mistakes we make is to idolize the artist rather than the art.
Charles F. Glassman
#24. I feel like Adele is a diva. Not in the bad way. She is one of the greatest voices of this industry and of her own art. What she offers is so unique that she's risen to such a status that very few artists can enjoy.
Xavier Dolan
#25. It may well be, of course, that America's pop culture is on balance better than our high art. I don't think so, but you can certainly make a case that the best of it aspires to a degree of aesthetic and emotional seriousness that is directly comparable to all but the very greatest works of high art.
Terry Teachout
#26. The arts open your heart and mind to possibilities that are limitless. They are pathways that touch upon our brains and emotions and bring sustenance to imagination. Human beings' greatest form of communication, they walk in tandem with science and play, and best describe what it is to be human.
Jacques D'Amboise
#27. What is your idea of you? Who is it that you have decided to become? If your greatest work of art is the life you live, and ultimately life is a creative act, what life will you choose to leave behind as your masterpiece?
Erwin Raphael McManus
#28. She believed photography to be the greatest of all art forms because it was simultaneously junk food and gourmet cuisine, because you could snap dozens of pictures in a couple of hours, then spend dozens of hours perfecting just a couple of them.
Tommy Wallach
#29. I suppose I do believe that the greatest art consoles a wound that it creates, that art can give you the capacity to endure and respond to the pain it forces you to feel. Psychological pain, I mean.
Christian Wiman
#30. In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said ... of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
Susan Sontag
#31. The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that.
Katherine Anne Porter
#32. He felt that there is a loose balance of good and evil, and that the art of living consists in getting the greatest good out of the greatest evil.
Machado De Assis
#33. It is a very easy thing to devise good laws; the difficulty is to make them effective. The great mistake is that of looking upon men as virtuous, or thinking that they can be made so by laws; and consequently the greatest art of a politician is to render vices serviceable to the cause of virtue.
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke
#34. I think it's the strength of her music, using art to make a statement. I think it really is. It was not a cheap gift. The gift was an expensive gift for Nina [Simone]. Diamonds are expensive. Her music was expensive. She paid for it, but I think it's her greatest gift.
Nikki Giovanni
#35. Years ago I decided that the greatest need in our Country was Art ... We were a very young country and had very few opportunities of seeing beautiful things, works of art ... So, I determined to make it my life's work if I could.
Isabella Stewart Gardner
#36. If you want to help people, if you care, go to the cities. The city is where the pain is the greatest - and the cities are a hell of a lot of fun if you like art, movies and plays.
Frederick Lenz
#37. Art's greatest efforts are invariably a timid counterfeit of Nature.
Honore De Balzac
#38. The art (as opposed to the technology) of reading requires that you develop a beautiful tolerance for incomprehension. The greatest books are the books that you come to understand more deeply with time, with age and with rereading.
Michael Silverblatt
#41. The art of living is to rise above lesser things so that we can truly enjoy great things. And the message of Christmas is the greatest of all things.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
#42. The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.
Henry Bolingbroke
#43. Who thinks his great achievements poor
Shall find his vigour long endure.
Of greatest fulness, deemed a void,
Exhaustion ne'er shall stem the tide.
Do thou what's straight still crooked deem;
Thy greatest art still stupid seem,
And eloquence a stammering scream.
Lao-Tzu
#44. 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
#45. The child will leave the nest. The best paint job will crack. The best play will become boring. The best work will grow tedious. The best art will lose meaning. The greatest creation will decay. Behind all this, lies my true self.
Vironika Tugaleva
#46. Right now I'm the greatest. I don't say this through vanity. It's just that the rest are so bad.
Salvador Dali
#47. All trades, arts, and handiworks have gained by division of labor ... Where the different kinds of work are not distinguished and divided, where everyone is a jack-of-all-trades, there manufactures remain still in the greatest barbarism.
Immanuel Kant
#48. I hope that my life ends up being my greatest work of art, not just my music.
Jewel
#49. We are fighting the greatest battle of all time with the most untrained army on earth. If strict discipline is necessary in art and athletics, how can we expect to be advanced Christians and stay in kindergarten?
Vance Havner
#51. I think it [religion] is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communion all the other arts attempt.
Dodie Smith
#52. The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society.
Nicolas Chamfort
#55. The greatest honor that can be paid to the work of art, on its pedestal of ritual display, is to describe it with sensory completeness. We need a science of description. Criticism is ceremonial revivification.
Camille Paglia
#56. One of the greatest difficulties in civil war is, that more art is required to know what should be concealed from our friends, than what ought to be done against our enemies.
Lord Chesterfield
#57. Art reaches its greatest peak when devoid of self-conciousness. Freedom discovers man the moment he loses concern over what impression he is making or about to make.
Bruce Lee
#58. Architecture exhibits the greatest extent of the difference from nature which may exist in works of art. It involves all the powers of design, and is sculpture and painting inclusively. It shows the greatness of man, and should at the same time teach him humility.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#59. Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings.
Vicki Baum
#60. The greatest question of all is whether our experience on this planet is 'it' or whether there is something else. Things in the supernatural realm give support, strangely perhaps, to the things we take on faith.
Art Bell
#61. It is the greatest of crimes to depress true art and science.
William Blake
#63. The greatest of the arts is the conquering of men.
Jack London
#64. Science is the Differential Calculus of the mind. Art the Integral Calculus; they may be beautiful when apart, but are greatest only when combined.
Ronald Ross
#65. And, moreover, it is art in its most general and comprehensive form that is here discussed, for the dialogue embraces everything connected with it, from its greatest object, the state, to its least, the embellishment of sensuous existence.
Friedrich Schleiermacher
#66. To be a teacher is my greatest work of art.
Joseph Beuys
#67. The worse you're performing, the more you must work mentally and emotionally. The greatest and toughest art in golf is "playing badly well." All the true greats have been masters at it.
Jack Nicklaus
#68. In addition, I think religion has a chance of a look-in whenever the mind craves solace in music or poetry
in any form of art at all. Personally, I think it is an art, the greatest one; an extension of the communication all the other arts attempt.
Dodie Smith
#69. I'm art. You're art. We are God's greatest works, simple as that.
Tracy Morgan
#70. The Who is one of my favorite bands of all time. 'The Who Sell Out' is one of the greatest art-project albums of all time.
Buzz Osborne
#72. Art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex.
Vladimir Nabokov
#73. Tolstoy is one of the greatest artists in history, but he finally became infused with the idea of the uselessness of art. He gave himself to his own kind of religion.
Gerald Stern
#74. All artforms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living.
Bertolt Brecht
#75. Every artist wants his work to be permanent. But what is? The Aswan Dam covered some of the greatest art in the world. Venice is sinking. Great books and pictures were lost in the Florence floods. In the meantime we still enjoy butterflies.
Romare Bearden
#76. Prospecting for oil is a dynamic art ... The greatest single element in all prospecting, past, present and future, is the man willing to take a chance
Everette Lee DeGolyer
#77. Hollywood, America's greatest modern contribution to world culture, is a business, a religion, an art form, and a state of mind.
Camille Paglia
#78. My greatest fortune was that I was ordered to take up art for the good of my health
Kyffin Williams
#79. Jazz is the greatest American art form and our greatest export. We don't pay attention to the youth of jazz, don't stoke the fires creatively for the youth coming up. I feel like jazz musicians became too much of purists - with Donald Byrd doing funk jazz in the '70s.
Talib Kweli
#80. The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.
Walter Bagehot
#81. In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods are everywhere
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
#82. I just love the whole art form of acting, of being in front of a camera and playing different things. Not that I would ever say I'm the greatest actor in the world, but I am capable of playing different kinds of roles that emotionally I could get into.
Andrew Dice Clay
#83. Sincerity and the correct use of the voice are the greatest things in the art of acting.
Alla Nazimova
#84. Next to war, art is the greatest way to immortalize a reputation.
Roman Genn
#85. Our lives will become our greatest works of art not only when our relationships are a beautiful expression of love, acceptance, and intimacy, but when we have a deep sense of purpose that produces accomplishments that express, for us, success and significance.
Erwin Raphael McManus
#86. Personally, I experience the greatest degree of pleasure in having contact with works of art. They furnish me with happy feelings of an intensity that I cannot derive from other sources.
Albert Einstein
#87. The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
Abraham Lincoln
#89. Even Michelangelo on his deathbed thought he'd done nothing to ennoble art. He wanted to destroy his work-the Pieta! And this from the greatest artist who ever lived. Of course I am not comparing my work to Michelangelo's. But this eternal dissatisfaction of the artist is what I was talking about.
John Huston
#90. I'm very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It's the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.
Nick Cave
#91. One of the greatest skills in the practice of the military art is the avoidance of the natural tendency to overrate or underestimate the enemy.
Hugh M. Cole
#92. Tragedy is the greatest art form of all. It gives us the courage to continue with our life by exposing us to the pain of life. It is unsentimental, it takes us seriously as human beings, it is not condescending. Paradoxically, by seeing pain we are made greater, it becomes a need.
Howard Barker
#93. I mean really, how could an artistic individual stay grounded in the nitty-gritty of how many minutes per pound meat has to stay in the oven when trying to fathom the creative philosophy behind the greatest artistic minds of the world?
E.A. Bucchianeri
#95. The greatest work and art comes from wrestling with the void
Ryan Holiday
#96. Parents are usually more careful to bestow knowledge on their children rather than virtue, the art of speaking well rather than doing well; but their manners should be of the greatest concern.
R. Buckminster Fuller
#97. Definition: Alpinism is the art of going through the mountains confronting the greatest dangers with the biggest of cares. What we call art here, is the application of a knowledge to an action.
Rene Daumal
#98. Great art likes chains. The greatest artists have created art within bounds. Or else they have created their own chains.
Nadia Boulanger
#99. In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense.
Joseph Brodsky
#100. Florence is perhaps best known for being the seat of Renaissance art, and rightly so: A greatest-hits collection of artists passed through its streets - Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, and Brunelleschi among them.
Hanya Yanagihara
