Top 100 Human Art Quotes
#1. He destroys that he might build; for when He is about to rear His sacred temple in us, He first totally razes that vain and pompous edifice, which human art and power had erected, and from its horrible ruins a new structure is formed, by His power only.
Jeanne Marie Bouvier De La Motte Guyon
#2. Human art, Mahnmut knew, simply transcended human beings.
Dan Simmons
#3. Where a love of natural beauty has been cultivated, all nature becomes a stupendous gallery, as much superior in form and in coloring to the choicest collections of human art, as the heavens are broader and loftier than the Louvre or the Vatican.
Horace Mann
#4. The theatre, like the fresco, is art fitted to its place. And therefore it is above all else the human art, the living art.
Romain Rolland
#5. The finest productions of human art are immensely short of the meanest work of Nature. The nicest artist cannot make a feather or the leaf of a tree.
Thomas Reid
#6. The birch-bark canoe of the savage seems to me one of the most beautiful and perfect things of the kind constructed by human art.
William Cullen Bryant
#7. It is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#8. Art is human. Error is human. Art is error.
David Bayles
#10. The noblest works of human art and pride show that their makers were not satisfied.
Henry Abbey
#11. The human art form is in uniting fruitful activity with a contemplative stance, not one or the other, but always both at the same time.
Richard Rohr
#12. Poetry is a niche genre, sure, but it has a way of opening people up. It opens me up. As with music and art, poetry is an essential human art and discussing its genesis, fruition and prose with somebody legitimately interested is intensely rewarding.
Nicholas Trandahl
#13. Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God.
Gerhard Richter
#14. The sea, vast and wild as it is, bears thus the waste and wrecks of human art to its remotest shore. There is no telling what it may not vomit up.
Henry David Thoreau
#15. All the performances of human art, at which we look with praise or wonder, are instances of the resistless force of perseverance.
Samuel Johnson
#16. The art of dancing stands at the source of all the arts that express themselves first in the human person. The art of building, or architecture, is the beginning of all the arts that lie outside the person; and in the end they unite.
Havelock Ellis
#17. Making music and art is about expressing something that's universally human, maybe even beyond human, at best.
Cass McCombs
#18. The idea is that human culture as broadly defined
art, politics, technology, religion, and so on
evolves in much the way biological species evolve: new cultural traits arise and may flourish or perish, and as a result whole institutions can belief systems form and change.
Robert Wright
#19. The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#20. There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship.
Bertrand Russell
#21. It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine, she thought, the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.
Virginia Woolf
#22. It seems to me that a spiritual sensibility is built into human nature. Formal religion may or may not disappear but art, love and a desire to find beauty will remain.
Frank Schaeffer
#23. Art is the expression of those beauties and emotions that stir the human soul.
Howard Pyle
#25. I owe it all to words and art, the peace that came with a flicker of a pen silenced the suffering; eased the pain and life that was once filled with burden became sane again. It Became meaningful.
Art does matter, it made me, when the world changed me.
Nikki Rowe
#26. I am intrigued by the basics of human life, by our vulnerability, our desires, our sexuality - as far as I am concerned, character is expressed through sexuality. Art is able to represent human existence stripped to its essence by showing us the naked human body.
Thomas Koerfer
#27. Human bipolarity was both the binding force and the driving energy for all human behavior, from sonnets to nuclear equations. If any being thinks that human psychologists exaggerate on this point, let it search Terran patent offices, libraries, and art galleries for creations of eunuchs.
Robert A. Heinlein
#28. Fundamental physics is like an art more or less. It's completely non-practical, and you can't use it for anything. But it's about the universe and how the world came into being. It's very remote from your daily life and mine, and yet it defines us as human beings.
Yuri Milner
#29. The art is in preparing the content for optimal human consumption. The data doesn't just talk back to you. You collect, you analyze, you tell stories.
Leslie Bradshaw
#30. And now there's this. A talent show. Silly and nonsensical. Stupid and fun. Together. Laughing. Being part of the human race. Knowing about the horrors that have happened and will happen but choosing to live anyway. Maybe there's an art to being human.
Susan Ee
#31. I believe that every human being should try to do good for someone else. There are so many different ways to do it. My art can be an instrument for helping people ... What a good feeling - that I can do that with my art ...
Romero Britto
#32. All art is an expression and extension of ourselves.. Art finds its deepest value when it is the authentic expression of a deep human experience.
Erwin Raphael McManus
#33. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.
Vladimir Nabokov
#34. I think that music and art and film, at their best, can connect with something that is eternal in human beings, that might not have so many labels on it, something that's ultimately universal and that may just be a feeling.
Tunde Adebimpe
#35. To awaken human emotion is the highest level of art.
Isadora Duncan
#36. Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday
Don Marquis
#37. What we call art would seem to be specialist artifacts for enhancing human perception.
Marshall McLuhan
#38. Tattooing, when understood in its entirety, must be seen as a religious act. The human being brings forth images from the center of the self and communicates them to the world. Fantasy is embodied in reality and the person is made whole.
Spider Webb
#39. I have a preference for writing that deals with domestic issues; even in visual art, I like work that focuses on very small aspects of human life. I like movies that have a very narrow focus. I can see how it might be viewed as limiting, but I don't experience it that way.
Carol Windley
#40. I try to concentrate on quality clothing and accessories that are worth having, and to get my people to take fewer trips by air and stay longer each time they travel. It's more human, especially if they take time to visit an art gallery while there.
Vivienne Westwood
#41. The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture ... Sometimes ... it seems to me that ... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.
Michelangelo
#42. I think it started since I was born, I always had a need to express myself, you know, as a human being, and I found that it felt right when I expressed myself through art, dance, through acting, so it kind of happened naturally.
Alex Meraz
#43. In order to correctly define art, it is necessary, first of all, to cease to consider it as a means to pleasure and consider it as one of the conditions of human life ... Reflecting on it in this way, we cannot fail to observe that art is one of the means of effective communication between people.
Leo Tolstoy
#44. God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.
Jorge Luis Borges
#45. Last year, [Pope Francis] was asked about his secret to happiness. He said slow down. Take time off. Live and let live. Don't proselytize. Work for peace. Work at a job that offers basic human dignity. Don't hold on to negative feelings. Move calmly through life. Enjoy art, books and playfulness.
Timothy Egan
#46. Because we are saturated with life, because we are human, our strongest motive is life, humanity; and the stronger the motive back of the line the stronger, and therefore more beautiful, the line will be.
Robert Henri
#47. A work of art enters life very much like another human being - complicated, loaded with overtones and meaning, mysterious, enticing, obsessive, and beautiful. There's no way to control how it will be used, how it will be read, and that's part of the excitement of it.
Budd Hopkins
#48. In any case, perhaps the quest for data to support our actions gets overemphasized. After all, our emotions distinguish us. Art and poetry and music are from and to the human heart, as is, for many, our relationship with the land.' ~ Randy Morgenson
Eric Blehm
#49. All of us use art and literature as an escape from time to time, but if it's any good, it has a healing quality - a quality that enlarges our human spirits.
Katherine Paterson
#50. Art that imposes conditions - human or otherwise - on the receiver for its appreciation in my eyes constitutes aesthetic fascism.
Lawrence Weiner
#51. The only real distinction at this dangerous moment in human history and cosmic development has nothing to do with medals and ribbons. Not to fall asleep is distinguished. Everything else is mere popcorn.
Saul Bellow
#52. Poetry is not an end in itself but in the service of life; of what use are poems, or any other works of art, unless to enable human lives to be lived with insight of a deeper kind, with more sensitive feelings, more intense sense of the beautiful, with deeper understanding?
Kathleen Raine
#53. Chess is neither a science nor an art. It is what human nature most delights in
a fight.
Emanuel Lasker
#54. Cats are anthropomorphised in art because they are so laid back that you automatically attribute human thoughts and feelings to them.
Jim Davis
#55. The art of procreation and the members employed therein are so repulsive, that if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#56. Inability, human incapacity, is the only boundary to an art.
Emile Zola
#57. The Arts and Sciences, essential to the prosperity of the State and to the ornament of human life, have a primary claim to the encouragement of every lover of his country and mankind.
George Washington
#58. In my view, the lost art of listening and ignoring the patient as a human being is a quintessential failure of our health care.
Bernard Lown
#59. I define art as a work created by a human that has a unique point of view and discovers something that was not there before.
Signe Baumane
#60. Art is not life, and life is not art; but the beauty and horror of the human condition exists between the two.
H.G. Mewis
#61. It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist.
C.S. Lewis
#62. I have trouble with modern art. But in general, all art forms fascinate me - art is the way human beings express what we can't say in words.
Andrea Bocelli
#63. This is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him. Not a figment of his soul but something that appears to the soul and demands the soul's creative power. What is required is a deed that a man does with his whole being..
Martin Buber
#64. For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he is, then so is truth itself or beauty itself.
Deepak Chopra
#65. Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of its ideas as well; it can dismiss the difficult, arduous work writers do to make an art that becomes and remains part of and significant within a human landscape.
Toni Morrison
#66. The most momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.
Pythagoras
#67. The human body is an instrument for the production of art in the life of the human soul.
Alfred North Whitehead
#68. Denied access to information about important arenas of human life, history, and art, women like Augusta Welland demonstrate well into adulthood a lack of moral insight and sympathetic compassion.
Edith Wharton
#69. There is nothing harder to learn than painting and nothing which most people take less trouble about learning. An art school is a place where about three people work with feverish energy and everybody else idles to a degree that I should have conceived unattainable by human nature.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#70. Once there was a race, quite unlike the human race - quite. I have no way of describing to you what they looked like or how they lived, but they had one characteristic you can understand: they were creative. The creating and enjoying of works of art was their occupation and their reason for being.
Robert A. Heinlein
#71. Art is not vague production, transitory and isolated, but a power which must be directed to the improvement and refinement of the human soul.
Wassily Kandinsky
#72. In human life, art may arise from almost any activity, and once it does so, it is launched on a long road of exploration, invention, freedom to the limits of extravagance, interference to the point of frustration, finally discipline, controlling constant change and growth.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#73. As I developed as an artist and studied art history, I noticed that all the great works were dealing with the human condition. [Art] had humor in it. It had sex in it. But it also had sorrow running through it.
Eric Drooker
#74. THE ART OF PEACE is not easy. It is a fight to the finish, the slaying of evil desires and all falsehood within. On occasion the voice of peace resounds like thunder, jolting human beings out of their stupor.
Morihei Ueshiba
#75. There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice ... In the end, I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
Adrienne Rich
#76. Art is a weapon that penetrates the eyes, the ears, the deepest and subtlest human feelings.
David Alfaro Siqueiros
#77. What is art? Art grows from joy and sorrow, but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives.
Edvard Munch
#78. Music, art, writing ... it's like some
magical psychic drainage. A way of
tapping into the bigger picture of all
it is to be human.
Lou Rhodes
#79. Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.
Ted Shawn
#80. Every good piece of art ... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it.
John Ruskin
#81. Science is a limited way of knowing, looking at just the natural world and natural causes. There are a lot of ways human beings understand the universe - through literature, theology, aesthetics, art or music.
Eugenie Scott
#82. Individuality realized is the supreme attainment of the human soul, the master-master's work of art. Individuality is sacred.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#83. People think our work is monumental because it's art, but human beings do much bigger things: they build giant airports, highways for thousands of miles, much, much bigger than what we create.
Christo
#84. The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing.
Richard Leakey
#85. Pollock said several times that he couldn't separate himself from his art. Not knowing much about modern art when I began to read about him, I was much more his persona - his struggles as a human being - that was interesting to me.
Ed Harris
#86. Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
Steven Pinker
#87. I have never really been a great artist. I have been a human being that has loved art, which is not the same thing. But I have loved and believed in art and the idea of universal brotherhood so much, that I have put everything I have into them, and I have been blessed.
Josephine Baker
#88. The role of art for me is the visualization of attitude, of the human attitude towards life, towards the world.
Josef Albers
#89. Originally this was the most important thing about martial arts - to reach a higher level, to become a strong human being. Strong doesn't mean big arms. It means who can be a more strict human being with himself. That is the ideal of martial arts.
Tsutomu Ohshima
#90. Programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.
Donald Knuth
#91. The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.
Pope Paul VI
#92. The human spirit's unquenchable drive for originality and compulsion for creating art is the compelling force of our humanity.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#93. Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.
John Berger
#94. Every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris.
Rebecca West
#95. In some ways, art is the most terrifying of human inventions. It preserves the right to undermine all the categories. The history of art is the history of iconoclasm, the history of some new voice saying that everything you know is wrong.
Richard Powers
#96. But shitty human beings sometimes make great art.
Jerry Heller
#97. The true artist does not create art as an end in itself; he creates art for human beings. Humanity is the goal.
Bronislaw Huberman
#98. The Americans ... are almost ignorant of the art of music, one of the most elevating, innocent and refining of human tastes, whose influence on the habits and morals of a people is of the most beneficial tendency.
James F. Cooper
#99. To me, the highest expression of life is art with jokes. It's very rarified, very difficult to accomplish if you want to be more than just funny and more than just jokes about human gaseousness.
Neil Peart
#100. We live in an age when the traditional great subjects - the human form, the landscape, even newer traditions such as abstract expressionism - are daily devalued by commercial art.
Andy Warhol
