Top 99 Language Art Quotes
#1. Far from being dominated by ideas from Paris and New York, Latin American artists were often the innovators. They were doing drip paintings in advance of Pollock, creating language art before the American conceptualists, and fashioning shaped canvases decades before Kelly or Stella.
Mari Carmen Ramirez
#2. The importance of an artist is to be measured by the quantity of new signs which he has introduced to the language of art.
Henri Matisse
#3. You can tell within a sentence if something is fiction or non-fiction. You can tell in the artifice of the language or the care of the construction the difference between art and life.
Ethan Canin
#4. Abstract art was the quivalent of poetic expression; I didn't need to use words,but colors and lines. I didn't need to belong to a language-oriented culture but to an open form of expression.
Etel Adnan
#5. Art works because it appeals to certain faculties of the mind. Music depends on details of the auditory system, painting and sculpture on the visual system. Poetry and literature depend on language.
Steven Pinker
#6. Art speaks its own language-soul to soul, heart to heart.
Ana Tzarev
#7. The Biblical worldview is not given to us in the discursive and analytical language of philosophy and science, but in rich and compact language of symbolism and art.
James Jordan
#8. Visual journals are created in a secret language of symbols. Intentional or not, they are private maps only their makers can follow.
Jennifer New
#9. Eloquence is the language of nature, and cannot be learned in the schools; but rhetoric is the creature of art, which he who feels least will most excel in.
Charles Caleb Colton
#10. The way I make art - the way a lot of people make art - is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important.
Shepard Fairey
#11. The art of communication is the language of leadership.
James Humes
#12. To rob, to ravage, to murder, in their imposing language, are the arts of civil policy. When they have made the world a solitude, they call it peace.
[Lat., Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium, atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.]
Tacitus
#13. Politics is the art of promising heaven and delivering purgatory, and claiming hero status for saving your country from hell.
Bangambiki Habyarimana
#14. Art is a language which everyone understands in their own way.
Debasish Mridha
#15. Indeed art is fundamental : to science, mathematics and to language. Unfortunately theorists, educators, parents and administrators have not fully understood its importance, relegating it to a secondary role, or that of an add on.
John A. Hiigli
#16. Mastery of the art and spirit of the Germanic language enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.
Mark Twain
#17. Though Marcus' essay extends over 13 pages of small text, at its core is a very simple premise: Contemporary American fiction has lost its innovative edge and its interest in language as art, and Jonathan Franzen is largely, if not exclusively, to blame.
Jess Row
#18. What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.
Adrienne Rich
#19. We must remember, however, that art is of value only to the extent that it speaks to us. It might be a universal language if we ourselves were universal in our sympathies.
Okakura Kakuzo
#20. There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.
William Osler
#21. it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from mere animated photography, in short, creating a language.
Andre Bazin
#22. Language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art; the result of the creativity of thousands of generations.
Edward Sapir
#23. Hip-hop culture is probably one of the most powerful things to come out of America in a long time - everything from the music to the art to the dance to the language.
Will.i.am
#24. In the world of language, or in other words in the world of art and liberal education, religion necessarily appears as mythology or as Bible.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#25. Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.
Vincent Van Gogh
#26. I feel like really thinking about art and really appreciating it and learning the language of it just makes you more of a connoisseur. I believe that.
David Rees
#28. Alexander von Humboldt's wide-ranging Views of Nature is a masterpiece of nineteenth-century natural history, at once science and art. Mark W. Person's stunning new translation makes the wonders of this classic accessible to the English-language world of the present.
Daniel Walker Howe
#29. The art of motion pictures is pictorial and language comes a distant second.
Jean-Jacques Annaud
#30. The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail.
John Wesley Powell
#31. Design is a form of competitive advantage. People tend to think of design as good art, good visual language, which it absolutely has to be. But it's also about the ability to do systems thinking.
James P Hackett
#32. Childhood is the time and children's books are the place for powerful emotions, powerful language, powerful art ... There is no room for cutesy books, dull books, or books that talk down. Children are not inferior. They may be small in stature but not in what they feel, think, listen, and see.
Betsy Hearne
#33. I'm so language-based and I'm so about communicating, and my art has always been very audience-based, and very about being functional and communicating something, and about feeling like I have to be heard.
Kathleen Hanna
#34. Hip-hop started as this niche moment, and the values of it, the cultures that it carried on its back; language, clothes, the way you wear your clothes, the items that you consume, all came with the music as an art form. And those things helped transform how people buy, shop, speak, engage.
Steve Stoute
#35. In learning the art of storytelling by animation, I have discovered that language has an anatomy.
Walt Disney
#36. Language has time as its element; all other media have space as their element.
Soren Kierkegaard
#37. In truth, the best long-term explanations about our ancient counterparts can be found in the paintings, sculpture, crafts, tools of utility, language and architecture left behind. These are the building blocks of civilization we call culture. These are what we call 'the arts.
Edward J. Fraughton
#38. Language is not subtle enough, tender enough, to express all that we feel; and when language fails, the highest and deepest longings are translated into music. Music is the sunshine - the climate - of the soul, and it floods the heart with a perfect June.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#39. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
Marshall McLuhan
#40. The aim of language ... is to communicate ... to impart to others the results one has obtained ... As I talk, I reveal the situation ... I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#41. The art of music, rather more daughter than imitator of nature, in her impressive and mysterious language minding and educating us, rouses directly our temper and rules us to the depths of our souls.
Carl Maria Von Weber
#42. Art is a manifestation of emotion, and emotion speaks a language that all may understand.
W. Somerset Maugham
#43. The language of art is a 'parabolic' language, with a special openness to the universal: the 'Way of Beauty' is a way capable of leading the mind and heart to the Lord, to elevate them to the heights of God.
Pope Benedict XVI
#44. Its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent
Mark O'Connell
#45. Art thou like me, child of my darkest heart? And dost thou think my untamed thoughts and speak my vast language?"
"Yea, we are twin brothers, O, Night; for thou revealest space and I reveal my soul.
Kahlil Gibran
#46. No-one who has a real understanding of the art of painting attaches any importance to what we call the subject of a picture - what is represented. To one who feels the language of pictorial form, all depends on how it is presented, nothing on what.
Roger Fry
#47. Between words and objects one can create new relations and specify characteristics of language and objects generally ignored in everyday life.
Rene Magritte
#48. A programming language that is sort of like Pascal except more like assembly except that it isn't very much like either one, or anything else. It is either the best language available to the art today, or it isn't.
Raymond Simard
#49. Poetry offers works of art that are beautiful, like paintings, which are my second favorite work of the art, but there are also works of art that embody emotion and that are kind of school for feeling. They teach how to feel, and they do this by the means of their beauty of language.
Donald Hall
#50. Now, the language that had grown up and formed itself on those principles is what one is dealing with, and the problem is to bring a work of art in that medium into another medium formed on different principles and heard and understood in a different way.
Robert Fitzgerald
#51. Art is an international language, understood by all.
Igor Babailov
#52. Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.
Aldo Leopold
#53. Visual art is a foreign language I'm fluent at, but my native language is language.
Julia Glass
#54. Nas' Illmatic blew my mind when I first heard it. The poetry was done on such a high level that in a way, it validated our existence, our culture. He used the language of the street at the time and made it art. Art tends to be validating.
Erik Parker
#55. Poetry is an art practiced with the terribly plastic material of human language.
Carl Sandburg
#56. The autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture - religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology.
Antonio Damasio
#57. Science is a matter of adjusting language to explain material reality. Art is a matter of adjusting material reality to create a sense of life.
Walter Darby Bannard
#58. Art is a universal language and through it each nation makes its own unique contribution to the culture of mankind.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
#59. Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.
Edward Hirsch
#60. [Art] can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.
Herbert Marcuse
#61. A painting is a universal language which everyone can read, understand, and interpret in his own way through the power of imagination.
Debasish Mridha
#62. DYER. No, I am not of your Mind, for the Dialogue was fitted up with too much Facility. Words must be pluckt from Obscurity and nourished with Care, improved with Art and corrected with Application. Labour and Time are the Instruments in the perfection of all Work.
Peter Ackroyd
#63. I once saw a small child go to an electric light switch as say, "Mamma, can I open the light?" She was using the age-old language of exploration, the language of art. It was a sort of metaphor, but she was not using it as ornamentation.
Ezra Pound
#64. My mother had a mantra: musical instrument, foreign language, martial art.
E.L. James
#65. An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.
Thomas Mann
#66. In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.
Theodore Bikel
#67. TV is a language all its own, a land of one dimensional stereotypes that destroys culture, not adds to it. TV is anti-art, a reflection of consumerism that serves the power structure. TV is about demographics.
Roseanne Barr
#68. Language, after all, is only the use of symbols, and Art also can only affect us through symbols.
George Henry Lewes
#69. Art as language ... in the future there will only be art. This common language will carry the message of love.
Theo Van Doesburg
#70. Language, thought, analysis, art, dance, poetry, mythmaking: these are the things that point the way toward the realm of the eschaton.
Terence McKenna
#71. As far as I can tell, there are two kinds of poets: those who want to tell stories and sing songs, and those who want to work out the chemical equation for language and pass on their experiments as poetry.
Simon Armitage
#72. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
Oscar Wilde
#73. The arts, like language, emerged spontaneously and universally in similar forms across cultures, employing imaginative and intellectual capacities that had clear survival value.
Denis Dutton
#74. No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.
Theodore Bikel
#75. He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed.
John Ruskin
#76. Art is a language, an instrument of knowledge, an instrument of communication.
Jean Dubuffet
#77. I heard someone say he [Carl Sandburg] was the kind of writer who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being translated into another language.
Robert Frost
#78. We have a language that reflects how we learn to paint, but not how we learn to paint our paintings. How do you describe the [reader to place words here] that changes when craft swells into art?
David Bayles
#79. Such is the never-failing beauty and accuracy of language, the most perfect art in the world; the chisel of a thousand years retouches it.
Henry David Thoreau
#80. Strictly speaking, nothing that's said is true. (Though one can be the truth, one can't ever say it.)
Susan Sontag
#81. Poetic language features an iconic rather than a predominantly conventional relationship of form and content in which all language (and cultural) elements, variant as well as invariant, may be involved in the expression of the content.", "Analysis of the Poetic Text.
Yuri Lotman
#82. A culture is not only the language and the arts of a people. It is all their history, all their hopes for the future.
Robert Payne
#83. The art of translation lies less in knowing the other language than in knowing your own.
Ned Rorem
#84. Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life ...
Jane Hirshfield
#85. As children, we come into the world with a natural desire to both speak and draw. Society makes sure that we learn language properly, right from the beginning, but art is treated as a gift of innate genius, something we either have or don't.
Charles De Lint
#86. No one questions the fact that verbal language has to be learned, but the commonplaceness of visual experience betrays art; people tend to assume that, because they can see, they can see art.
Anne Truitt
#87. If any art form can accommodate contemporary culture, it's the novel. It's so malleable - it can incorporate essays, poetry, film. Maybe the challenge for the novelist is to stretch his art and his language, to the point where it can finally describe what's happening around him.
Don DeLillo
#88. Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.
A.S. Byatt
#89. You have a person in a very tiny cell banging himself from one wall to the other and not being able to find any way out of it. What that person can do is talk. Is create a whole balloon of language which would carry him through the ceiling to somewhere else. This is the art. This is what a story is.
Dan Miron
#90. Art isn't held with the same high regard as it is after success. In any country, in any language, you're a loser if you're making music until you prove otherwise.
K'naan
#91. Painting is the only universal language. All nature is creation's picture book. Painting alone can describe every thing which can be seen, and suggest every emotion which can be felt. Art reaches back into the babyhood of time, and is man's only lasting monument.
William Morris Hunt
#92. The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur.
Graham Swift
#93. And yet I know that expressing oneself necessarily means being different. The writer's voice is a singular one, solitary. Art is nothing other than the freedom to express oneself in any language, in whatever manner, dressed any which way.
Jhumpa Lahiri
#94. In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.
Robert Hughes
#95. Language is an art, like brewing or baking ... It certainly is not a true instinct, for every language has to be learnt.
Charles Darwin
#97. Language is evidently one of the principle instruments or helps of thought; and any imperfection in the instrument, or in the mode of employing it, is confessedly liable, still more than in almost any other art, to confuse and impede the process, and destroy all ground of confidence in the result.
John Stuart Mill
#98. Art is a language. It's not a skill. It's not a stunt. It's not something that you just learn to do and put it down. It comes from the heart.
Wynona Mulcaster
#99. If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, then it is science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively, then it is art.
Albert Einstein
#100. Age in itself gives substance - what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer's mind.
Jane Hirshfield
