Top 100 Nature Art Quotes
#1. A hint - don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our Divine Master.
Paul Gauguin
#2. Do not copy nature. Art is an abstraction. Rather, bring your art forth by dreaming in front of her and think more of creation.
Paul Gauguin
#3. In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation.
Fernando Botero
#5. What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?
Thomas Carlyle
#6. Not by way of the forced and worn formula of Romaticism, but throught the closeness of an imagination that has never broken kinship with nature. Art must accept such gifts, and revaluate the giver.
Alain LeRoy Locke
#7. The enemy of art is the enemy of nature; art is nothing but the highest sagacity and exertions of human nature; and what nature will he honor who honors not the human?
Johann Kaspar Lavater
#9. Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound...
{His second motto, from King Lear by Shakespeare}
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#10. Is this wide world not large enough to fill thee,Nor Nature, nor that deep man's Nature, Art?Are they too thin, too weak and poor to still thee,Thou little heart?
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
#11. I was an anorexic, beer drinking, class cutting, doodling, shoplifting, skater chick that was into nature, art class, and the beach.
Rebecca Miller
#12. For thousands of years, we've insisted that art can make us better people. Unless a brief can be fashioned that, by its very nature, art appeals only to the best in people and never the darkness, which defies both logic and intuition, then we have to acknowledge that art can make some of us worse.
Steve Erickson
#13. Our bodies are at once the receiving and transmitting stations for life itself. It is the highest wisdom to recognize this fact and train our bodies to render them sensitive and responsive to nature. art and religion.
Ruth St. Denis
#14. His second motto: Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy laws my services are bound.
Carl Friedrich Gauss
#15. The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.
Lew Wallace
#16. Physics is an organized body of knowledge about nature, and a student of it says that he is learning physics, not nature. Art, like nature, has to be distinguished from the systematic study of it, which is criticism.
Northrop Frye
#17. Happiness is, in truth, a very cheap thing, when the heart will be contented to traffic with nature - art has quite a different price.
Sarah Josepha Hale
#18. Moral beauty is the basis of all true beauty. This foundation is somewhat covered and veiled in nature. Art brings it out, and gives it more transparent forms. It is here that art, when it knows well its power and resources, engages in a struggle with nature in which it may have the advantage.
Victor Cousin
#19. The arts objectify subjective reality, and subjectify outward experience of nature. Art education is the education of feeling, and a society that neglects it gives itself up to formless emotion. Bad art is corruption of feeling.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#20. Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.
James Freeman Clarke
#21. It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.
Michel De Montaigne
#22. What I strive most to achieve in art is to make you forget the material. The sculptor must ... communicate whatever struck his sensibility, so that a person beholding his work may experience in its entirety the emotion felt by the artist while he observed nature.
Medardo Rosso
#23. Nature often lets us down when we most need her; let us turn to art.
Baltasar Gracian
#24. Nature scarcely ever gives us the very best; for that we must have recourse to art.
Baltasar Gracian
#25. Nature and abstract forms are both materials for art, and the choice of one or the other flows from historically changing interests.
Meyer Schapiro
#26. Ah! What avails the classic bent
And what the cultured word,
Against the undoctored incident
That actually occurred?
And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme-
When Nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time?
Rudyard Kipling
#27. Choose only one master - Nature.
Rembrandt
#28. Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.
George Edward Woodberry
#29. With regard to ground of this nature, be before the enemy in occupying the raised and sunny spots, and carefully guard your line of supplies. Then you will be able to fight with advantage.
Sun Tzu
#30. I always think of my films within the context of where aesthetics meet economics. That's the nature of making art - not being naive about what is possible and getting what you need to tell the story you want to tell.
Ira Sachs
#31. The nature of light is a subject of no material importance to the concerns of life or to the practice of the arts, but it is in many other respects extremely interesting.
Thomas Young
#32. All art (after Duchamp) is conceptual (in nature) because art only exists conceptually.
Joseph Kosuth
#33. The nature of the beast is, art needs finance. That's how this industry works.
Nathan Fillion
#34. The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.
Lewis Mumford
#35. Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint.
Robert Delaunay
#36. When we speak of the perfection of art, we must recollect what the materials are with which a painter contends with nature. For the light of the sun he has but patent yellow and white lead - for the darkest shade, umber or soot.
John Constable
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. Divinity is accident of nature, magic is the work of an art.
Amit Kalantri
#42. The art of hiding in plain sight used to be second nature, and now it has become the whole of him
Helen Dunmore
#43. Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#44. A dog can be a living work of art, a constant reminder of the exquisite design and breathtaking detail of nature, beauty on four paws.
Dean Koontz
#45. Art is the need to create; but in its essence, immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man and nature is its end.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#46. Art brings out the grand lines of nature. Antione Bourdelle
Joseph Campbell
#47. 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
#48. Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.
Jacob Bronowski
#49. Nothing is lost and nothing is created in the operations of art as those of nature.
Louis Pasteur
#50. It is a law woven into the nature of man, attested by history, by science, by literature and art, and by dally experience, that strength of mind and force of character are the supreme rulers of human affairs.
Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar II
#51. If we examine a work of ordinary art, by means of a powerful microscope, all traces of resemblance to nature will disappear - but the closest scrutiny of the photogenic drawing discloses only a more absolute truth, a more perfect identity of aspect with the thing represented.
Edgar Allan Poe
#52. When our eyes met, I felt that I was growing pale. A curious sensation of terror came over me. I knew that I had come face to face with some one whose mere personality was so fascinating that, if I allowed it to do so, it would absorb my whole nature, my whole soul, my very art itself.
Oscar Wilde
#53. As all Nature's thousands changes But one changeless God proclaim; So in Art's wide kingdom ranges One sole meaning still the same: This is Truth, eternal Reason, Which from Beauty takes its dress, And serene through time and season Stands aye in loveliness.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#54. Every man should follow the bent of his nature in art and letters, always provided that he does not offend against the rules of morality and good taste.
Thomas Edward Brown
#55. Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art more and more. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her. If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.
Vincent Van Gogh
#56. 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
#57. It seems an odd idea to my students that poetry, like all art, leads us away from itself, back to the world in which we live. It furnishes the vision. It shows with intense clarity what is already there.
Helen Bevington
#58. If the art of ship-building were in the wood, ships would exist by nature.
Aristotle.
#60. Now a work of art is a work of nature, but it is a work of human nature. It is a work of the mind: and it's a work of the mind in circumstances for an occasion which, to which, for which, and which it may be supremely natural and simple and effective.
"The Nature of Art" December 19, 1954
Frank Lloyd Wright
#61. We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of art.
Joseph Addison
#62. The deficiencies of nature are what art and education seek to fill up.
Aristotle.
#63. First of all a natural talent is required; for when Nature opposes, everything else is in vain; but when Nature leads the way to what is most excellent, instruction in the art takes place ...
Hippocrates
#64. Remember, however, that thou art formed by nature to bear everything, with respect to which it depends on thy own opinion to make it endurable and tolerable, by thinking that it is either thy interest or thy duty to do this.
Marcus Aurelius
#65. The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.
Oscar Wilde
#66. The difference between the arts arises because of the difference in the nature of the mediums of expression and the emphasis induced by the nature of each medium. Each means of expression has its own order of being, its own units.
Hans Hofmann
#67. What strip mining is to nature the art market has become to culture.
Robert Hughes
#68. There's a therapeutic aspect to all making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense, and shape stuff, not to just expunge it. It's not just an exorcism.
Art Spiegelman
#69. I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.
William Shakespeare
#70. Be thou what thou singly art and personate only thyself. Swim smoothly in the stream of thy nature and live but one man.
Thomas Browne
#71. I think the dilemma exists because art, among all the other tidy categories, most closely resembles what it is like to be human. To be alive. It is our nature to be imperfect. To have uncategorized feelings and emotions. To make or do things that don't sometimes necessarily make sense.
Brene Brown
#72. Thither he bent his way, determined there
to rest at noon; and entered soon the shade
high roofed, and walks beneath, and alleys brown,
That opened in the midst a woody scene;
Nature's own work it seemed, Nature-taught Art
John Milton
#73. Some believe that art is the imitation of nature; in fact, nature is so sublime that it cannot be imitated. However noble it may be, art cannot perform a single one of the miracles of nature. And besides, why imitate nature when it can be perceived by all those endowed with senses?
Kahlil Gibran
#74. To practice properly the Art of Peace, you must: Calm the spirit and return to the source. Cleanse the body and spirit by removing all malice, selfishness, and desire. Be ever grateful for the gifts received from the universe, your family, Mother nature, and your fellow human beings.
Morihei Ueshiba
#76. 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
#77. The most beautiful landscape cannot hold my fascinated attention as much as nature by the seaside and all that is connected with water.
Lyonel Feininger
#78. First follow Nature, and your judgment frame
By her just standard, which is still the same:
Unerring nature, still divinely bright,
One clear, unchanged, and universal light,
Life, force, and beauty must to all impart,
At once the source, and end, and test of art.
Alexander Pope
#79. The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding.
Gretel Ehrlich
#80. There is no need to express art in terms of nature. It can perfectly well be expressed in terms of geometry and the exact sciences.
Georges Vantongerloo
#81. All praise of Civilization, or Art, or Contrivance, is so much dispraise of Nature ; an admission of imperfection, which it is man's business, and merit, to be always endeavouring to correct or mitigate.
John Stuart Mill
#82. Practice the art of patience for nature never acts in haste.
Og Mandino
#83. It is because of the servility of photography that I am fundamentally contemptuous of this chance invention which will never be an art but which plagiarizes nature by means of optics. (1848)
Alphonse De Lamartine
#86. Art must anchor in nature, or it is the sport of every breath of folly.
William Hazlitt
#87. The Ilan-Lael Foundation is an arts education foundation celebrating nature and the aesthetic of the built environment for its ability to help us see ourselves and our world in new ways.
James T. Hubbell
#88. All art is concerned with coming into being; for it is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature.
Aristotle.
#89. True art is but the anti-type of nature; the embodiment of discovered beauty in utility.
James A. Garfield
#92. Wrap thyself in the decent veil that the arts or the graces weave for thee, O human nature! It is only the statue of marble whose nakedness the eye can behold without shame and offence!
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
#93. My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.
Andy Goldsworthy
#94. Art imitates nature not in its effects as such, but in its causes, in its 'manner,' in its process, which are nothing but a participation in and a derivation of actual objects, of the Art of God himself.
Paul Claudel
#95. The poet must be alike polished by an intercourse with the world as with the studies of taste; one to whom labour is negligence, refinement a science, and art a nature.
Isaac D'Israeli
#96. 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
#97. Beauty inspires me - beauty in nature, people, and art. Smells and fragrances too. I know it sounds weird, but I'm a "fume head." I'm very olfactory-driven.
Maria Canals Barrera
#98. Art consists precisely in making us admire old stories, charming us with them eternally, as Nature charms with her eternal sun, her ancient earth, and her men built all on the same pattern, and all animated by the same feelings ...
Marie Bashkirtseff
#99. I wish to be of service to the artists of our own day, by showing them how a small beginning leads to the highest elevation, and how from so noble a situation it is possible to fall to utmost ruin, and consequently, how these arts resemble nature as shown in our human bodies.
Giorgio Vasari
#100. Aristotle says in the book of secrets that communicating too many arcana of nature and art breaks a celestial seal and many evils can ensue. Which does not mean that secrets must not be revealed, but that the learned must decide when and how.
Umberto Eco
