Life As Art Quotes

#1. Life is pure adventure, and the sooner we realize that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art.

Maya Angelou

#2. Life as Art
If you want to turn your life into a masterpiece
you must humble yourself to sell
a couple of shitty postcards
along the way.

Beryl Dov

#3. The beauty of reality-based art - art underwritten by reality hunger - is that it's perfectly situated between life itself and (unattainable) "life as art".

David Shields

#4. My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her.

Jacob Rothschild

#5. A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#6. My focus on silence is to be understood as an intrinsic part of the body's search for meaning amongst the noisy assaults of everyday life ... What quilts have brought to the viewing of art generally is this intervening layer of silence, of collected thought and concerted attention.

Radka Donnell

#7. O sleepers! what a thing is slumber! Sleep resembles death. Ah, why then dost thou not work in such wise as that after death thou mayst retain a resemblance to perfect life, when, during life, thou art in sleep so like to the hapless dead?

Leonardo Da Vinci

#8. I can't stand these damn shows on museum walls with neat little frames, where you look at the images as if they were pieces of art. I want them to be pieces of life!

W. Eugene Smith

#9. Life seemed too calm; people looked for unhappiness in art as one might look for a raw material in short supply.

Ilya Ehrenburg

#10. Without an allegiance to beauty, art degenerates into a caricature of itself. It is beauty that animates aesthetic experience, making it so seductive; but aesthetic experience itself degenerates into a kind of fetish or idol if it is held up as an end in itself, untested by the rest of life.

Roger Kimball

#11. The life of our class, of the wealthy and the learned, was not only repulsive to me but had lost all meaning. The sum of our action and thinking, of our science and art, all of it struck me as the overindulgences of a spoiled child.

Leo Tolstoy

#12. In no way am I demeaning writing or any other form of art because it's popular. What I'm saying is that anything fed into the industrial machinery to comply with rules of size and length and shelf-life has a hard time surviving as art.

Alberto Manguel

#13. The oldest theory of art belongs to the Greeks, who regarded art as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. The strength of that theory is that it explains the way in which art takes its materials from real life.

Leland Ryken

#14. Celebrate your life now, as it unfolds.
Turn away from judgement and negative theories about your worth, your potential, and your destiny. See what you already have.

Danny Gregory

#15. Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Harry S. Truman

#16. Praying is the same to the new creature as crying is to the natural. The child is not learned by art or example to cry, but instructed by nature; it comes into the world crying. Praying is not a lesson got by forms and rules of art, but flowing from principles of new life itself.

William Gurnall

#17. I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction.

Oscar Wilde

#18. We can have all the food and water we need, but without the sustenance of
real story, real art - without the wisdom, insight, and "life instruction" it brings - we will stagnate as a culture and become a swamp where quality life can no longer be sustained. So share your gifts! Share your art!

Derek Rydall

#19. Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

Thomas Mann

#20. Art and psychoanalysis give shape and meaning to life and that is why we adore them, but life as it is lived has no shape and meaning ...

Iris Murdoch

#21. I'm not actually a mom in real life, so it's fun to pretend to be one. I like to approach things the same in art as in life. You can choose to look on the positive side and enjoy whatever roles you're given. You can find the silver lining in anything.

Heather Graham

#22. As an artist you organize your life so that you get a chance to paint, a window of time, but that's no guarantee you'll create anything worth all your effort. You're always haunt by the idea you're wasting your life.

Chuck Palahniuk

#23. Our days weave together the simple pleasures of daily life, which we should never take for granted, and the higher pleasures of Art and Thought which we may now taste as we please, with none to forbid or criticise.

A.S. Byatt

#24. Country and western is ignored by the intellectuals. They don't look at it as an art form. They think it's just somebody sitting on his couch singing about his life.

Ricky Skaggs

#25. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud." "So life became a work of art," I marveled.

Kurt Vonnegut

#26. Life is a canvas, so make your life as an ageless art. Everybody will be able to look at it and enjoy it. And, with time, it will get more valuable.

Debasish Mridha

#27. In our life there is a single color, as on an artist palette which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

Marc Chagall

#28. I believe in the city as a natural human environment, but we must humanize it. It's art that will re-define public space in the 21st Century. We can make our cities diverse, inspirational places by putting art, dance and performance in all its forms into the matrix of street life.

Antony Gormley

#29. From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.

Toni Morrison

#30. Evergreen had opened up a whole new world to me. There I met many internationally celebrated people: there I was surrounded by the best art and music, as well as conversation. I knew I could never return to the life I had led before.

Billy Baldwin

#31. I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it.

Mary Cassatt

#32. Thus, the earlier part of her life had taught her that, while you can tell stories or write poems about life, you cannot make life poetic, live it as though it were a work of art...

Hannah Arendt

#33. As I've gotten less righteous, less pedagogic, I have become more loving of the artificiality, the art form, the imitation of life in film.

Ira Sachs

#34. Real-life discussions involve a great many bores and boors who have never learned that the art of conversation demands listening as well as talking.

Susan Jacoby

#35. I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself

Antonin Artaud

#36. Yes, but the artist?" said Nigel almost fiercely. "He's different, you know he is. He's driven by some compulsion: if he can't do what he knows he has to do with his life he might as well be dead. He's got to break through the world's indifference, or else break himself against it. He can't help it.

Mary Stewart

#37. 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

#38. Architecture isman'sgreat sense of himself embodied in a world of his own making. It may rise as high in quality only as its source because great art isgreat life.

Frank Lloyd Wright

#39. I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.

Maya Lin

#40. Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is like a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue ...

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#41. 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

#42. In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain; it only indicates.

Alan Watts

#43. Art has no place in modern life. It will continue to exist as long as there is a mania for the romantic and so long as there are people who love beautiful lies and deception ... Every modern cultured man must wage war against art, as against opium ... Photograph and be photographed.

Alexander Rodchenko

#44. Life may as properly be called an art as any other.

Henry Fielding

#45. There is no release
In a bodkin or disease,
Nor can there be a work so great
As that which cleans man's dirty slate.

William Butler Yeats

#46. That's what all art's about - a sense of moving away from boundaries that you can't in real life. Like a dancer is always trying to fly, really - to do something that's just not possible. But you try to do as much as you can within those physical boundaries.

Kate Bush

#47. If my fellow Americans could adopt even a fraction of the French attitude about food and life (don't worry, you don't have to sign on to the politics, too), managing weight would cease to be a terror, an obsession, and reveal its true nature as part of the art of living.

Mireille Guiliano

#48. Think of your day as a blank canvas, and everything you say, your art upon it. Then join your loved ones and friends, and create lasting beauty together, worthy of your inner Rembrandt.

Tom Althouse

#49. The whole art of living is to regard people who cause us suffering as, in a degree, enabling us to accept its divine form and thus to populate our daily life with divinities.

Marcel Proust

#50. I had a blog and was documenting my life as a college student in an art school. I had a few comments left by a few girls asking if I could do a tutorial on how I did my makeup. I didn't think my makeup was all that special, but I try my best to share whatever I can with my viewers.

Michelle Phan

#51. Life is seen as an ongoing war between art and philistinism - and although the philistines may win some of the battles, it is literature that always wins the war.

Helon Habila

#52. It is not badness, it is the absence of goodness, which, in Art as in Life, is so depressing.

Freya Stark

#53. Art! What a concept! It saved my life! A place where you can do as you please!

William T. Wiley

#54. Unless you took courses in architecture, engineering, or pre-med, the rest of your liberal arts education hardly prepares you for life as the business warrior and champion you envision yourself to be.

Gene Simmons

#55. All the art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time. Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life.

Alberto Giacometti

#56. When we separate our artistic activity from daily life, we cut ourselves off from our most valuable creative resource. However, if we live life as an art form in itself, we have available to us all that we experience and see.

Brenda Tharp

#57. French psychiatrist Pierre Janet: "Every life is a piece of art, put together with all means available." As

Bessel A. Van Der Kolk

#58. The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral.

Aristippus

#59. The art of life is to deal with problems as they arise, rather than destroy one's spirit by worrying about them too far in advance. Especially

Robert Harris

#60. As one passion begins to fail it is necessary to form another, for the whole art of going through life tolerably is to keep oneself eager about anything.

Susan Sontag

#61. Art thou afeard
To be the same in thine own act and valour
As thou art in desire? Wouldst thou have that
Which thou esteem'st the ornament of life,
And live a coward in thine own esteem,
Letting 'I dare not' wait upon 'I would,'
Like the poor cat i' the adage?

William Shakespeare

#62. In each of us lies a creditor and a debtor at once and the art is for the reckoning to tally inside us. We enter the world as a minute part of the life we are given, and from then on we are ever paying off debts. To ourselves. For ourselves. In order for the final reckoning to tally.' 'Is

Andrzej Sapkowski

#63. There is one great and universal wish of mankind expressed in all religions, in all art and philosophy, and in all human life: the wish to pass beyond himself as he now is.

Beatrice M. Hinkle

#64. Dance as if life is a work of art.
Dance as if life is a stage for a dance drama.

Debasish Mridha

#65. 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

#66. To me, the message of my songs, of all songs, is "enjoy life." My message as a person who evidently doens't have much more planned is the same. It's the only message I ever thought art had any business having.

Warren Zevon

#67. It's just odd that something as essential in life as sex has been flattened out in mainstream cinema - and in art cinema. Even in art movies, sex always seems to be treated negatively. Why does it always end in disaster?

John Cameron Mitchell

#68. There are periods in history when change is necessary, and other periods when it is better to keep everything for the time as it is. The art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age.

Oswald Mosley

#69. 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

#70. Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

John Lubbock

#71. It would be narrowness to suppose that an artist can only care for the impressions of those who know the methods of his art as well as feel its effects. Art works for all whom it can touch.

Gordon S. Haight

#72. Life is full of its disappointments, and I suppose the art of being happy is to disguise them as illusions.

Hector Hugh Munro

#73. Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.

Tom Rachman

#74. Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life.

William Morris

#75. 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

#76. Wanted, a man "who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to heed a strong will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.

Brett McKay

#77. All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer. art is an action against death. It is a denial of death.

Jacques Lipchitz

#78. You know, in my music career there was a moment where the irony was just so heavy. There were people in my audience that were the reason I developed neuroses. These people that tortured my life were using my art, my poetry, as fuel for them, to torture other people.

Fred Durst

#79. I only laid the cobbles for the streets of Bordertown; it took all of us, an entire community, to bring the city to life. And that's as it should be. Community, friendship, art: stirred together, they make a powerful magic. Used wisely, it can save your life. I know that it saved mine.

Terri Windling

#80. And I think that when once he had learned the art of arranging his words as he stood upon his legs, and had so mastered his voice as to have obtained the ear of the House, the work of his life was not difficult.

Anthony Trollope

#81. As the art of life is learned, it will be found at last that all lovely things are also necessary; a wild flower by the wayside, tended corn, wild birds and creatures of the forest, as well as the tended cattle; because man doth not live by bread only.

John Ruskin

#82. I like "Julie Gold's song "From a Distance". Her song reminds me of the world as seen through an observer's eye. Seen from a distance, we are people in the same band playing music for everyone. We are artists who play the most beautiful instruments in the world - life.

Ilchi Lee

#83. Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art
although it may possibly be very good journalism?

Sherwood Anderson

#84. I cannot, as you [Edward Weston] once proposed to me - solve the problem of life by losing myself in the problem of art ... in my case, life is always struggling to predominate and art naturally suffers.

Tina Modotti

#85. Mary thought that the art of love might just be blindness: the willingness not to see the truth of anything, to blur life's sharp edges and drift on an impression of one's own making, to act as if the life you lived was the life you wanted.

Robin Oliveira

#86. Art is not just to show life as it is, but to show life as it should be.

Paul Robeson

#87. That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men.

Oscar Wilde

#88. Till thou hast learned to suffer from a saint a well as from the wicked, and to be abused by the godly as well as the ungodly, never look to live a contented or comfortable life, nor ever think thou has truly learned the art of suffering (383).

Richard Baxter

#89. As I read you I fell in love with the holes between your words and I loved you most on the days you could not love yourself.

Jenim Dibie

#90. I made a life for myself in Africa that was as far as you could possibly get from art school at Yale.

Peter Beard

#91. In the end, the art of hunger can be described as an existential art. It is a way of looking death in the face, and by death I mean death as we live it today: without God, without hope of salvation. Death as the abrupt and absurd end of life

Paul Auster

#92. Discipleship is the art and science of helping people find, follow and fully become like Jesus. Discipleship happens as God's people show love, share truth and live life with one another, making new disciples along the way.

Brandon Cox

#93. Once upon a time, I thought faeries lived only in books, old folktales, and the past. That was before they burst upon my life as vibrant, luminous beings, permeating my art and my everyday existence, causing glorious havoc.

Brian Froud

#94. Writing is really wonderful art. A lot of this is discovery. A lot of things are lying around waiting to be discovered and that's our job as writers is to just notice them and bring them to life.

George Carlin

#95. The brain is full of lonely ideas, begging you to make some sense of them, to recognize them as interesting. The lazy brain just files them away in old pigeonholes, like a bureaucrat who wants an easy life. The lively brain picks and chooses and creates new works of art out of ideas.

Theodore Zeldin

#96. Just as writing can become calligraphy when it's creatively, skillfully, and consciously performed, so can all other activities become art. In this case, we are reflecting upon life itself as an artistic statement - the art of living.

H.E. Davey

#97. As I looked back over my life, I realized that I enjoyed nothing
not art, not sex
more than going to the movies.

Gore Vidal

#98. [ ... ] art instills the fundamental moral lesson: That you aren't the center of the universe. That others weren't created for your benefit. That they are just as real as you, with equal claimes to dignity and understanding.

William Deresiewicz

#99. No matter how much experience we may gather in life, we can never in life get the dimension of experience that the imagination gives us. Only the arts and sciences can do that, and of these, only literature gives us the whole sweep and range of human imagination as it sees itself

Northrop Frye

#100. Nothing will enrich your life as much as the appreciation of art. If you want to 'Live Rich', you have to - absolutely have to - include art in your life.

Mark M. Ford