Top 100 Quotes About A Work Of Art
#1. It seems to me a work of art is the evidence offered by a fantastically observant witness
John Banville
#2. People with a high level of personal mastery are able to consistently realize the results that matter most deeply to them-in effect, they approach their life as an artist would approach a work of art. The do that by becoming committed to their own lifelong learning.
Peter Senge
#3. A work of art has value only if tremors of the future run through it ...
Andre Breton
#4. Your life is a work of art, and in the end, the underlying theme of great art is bravery and hope and love.
Garrison Keillor
#5. A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.
Oscar Wilde
#6. Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.
Walter Benjamin
#7. A work of art is somehow organic, and to slash a painting or smash a statue is not just an offence against property: it is an offence against life.
Anthony Burgess
#8. Success is creating something original and lasting-whether it is a company, a work of art, an idea or analysis that influence others, or a happy and productive family.
Linda Chavez
#9. The complete and definitive work of art is created beyond one's individuality ... The universal transcends such a level. Mere spontaneity has never created a work of art which possesses a lasting cultural value. The method leading to universal form is based upon calculations of measure and number.
Theo Van Doesburg
#10. Communication
Is a work of art
Some are normally born with it
Some may need a chart
A. Saleh
#11. First time that I cried at a work of art was at a drum solo that I saw. A drummer named Winard Harper, part of the Billy Taylor Trio, gave back in - I would have been in high school - 2005 or something.
Damien Chazelle
#12. There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.
Jerome Bruner
#13. Art is not in some far-off place. A work of art is the expression of a man's whole personality, sensibility and ability.
Shinichi Suzuki
#16. Your life is a work of art, a craft to be carefully mastered. For patience has replaced time, and you are your own destination.
Rick Jarow
#18. Paintings are but research and experiment. I never do a painting as a work of art. All of them are researches. I search constantly and there is a logical sequence in all this research.
Pablo Picasso
#19. Nobody should ever receive more money for a work of art than the artist who produced it.
Pansy Schneider-Horst
#20. What is the universe? Is it a great 3D movie in which we are the unwilling actors? Is it a cosmic joke, a giant computer, a work of art by a Supreme Being or simply an experiment? The problem in trying to understand the universe is that we have nothing to compare it to.
Heinz Pagels
#21. Faith to me is a form of self-expression, like a work of art, a manifestation of freedom, not a tool for mindless conformity.
Sahar El-Nadi
#22. An eyewitness account is evidence that an artist has proposed a work of art. But documentary evidence (i.e. a photograph) is more conclusive.
Dieter Roth
#23. I am guilty of using dollar signs as proof of a work of art's longevity.
Barbara Goldsmith
#24. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART.
Joseph Beuys
#25. I believe that a work of art, like metaphors in language, can ask the most serious, difficult questions in a way which really makes the readers answer for themselves; that the work of art far more than an essay or a tract involves the reader, challenges him directly and brings him into the argument.
George Steiner
#26. Religion is a barbarous obsidian knife poised over our chests put it in a cabinet and admire it as a work of art, but don't ever wield the damned thing ever again.
PZ Myers
#27. The purpose of the painter is simply to reproduce in other minds the impression which a scene has made upon him. A work of art does not appeal to the intellect. It does not appeal to the moral sense. Its aim is to instruct, not to edify, but to awaken an emotion.
George Inness
#28. Like you were a work of art that I wanted to lock away because no one would ever appreciate your rare beauty like I would?
Lorelei James
#29. We have no other means of recognising a work of art than our feeling for it.
Clive Bell
#30. How should an artist begin to do his work as an artist? I would insist that he begin his work as an artist by setting out to make a work of art.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#31. Experiment - exercising to see the result. We planned Europa not as an experiment in this sense but as a work of art. Yet The Eye and the Ear was done as a consciously designed experiment. Not every avant-garde dealt with experiments and not every experiment equalled avant-garde.
Stefan Themerson
#32. The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.
Jerry Saltz
#34. You may not be a work of art, but you are definitely a piece of work.
Amy Harmon
#35. As a work of art, it reminds me of a long conversation between two drunks
Clive James
#36. There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.
Joyce Carol Oates
#37. I never get over feeling bad about tearing open a beautifully wrapped present. It takes ten seconds to destroy a work of art that took someone ten minutes to accomplish.
Andy Rooney
#38. Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural
Jonah Lehrer
#39. Some one has defined a work of art as a "thing beautifully done." I like it better if we cut away the adverb and preserve the word "done," and let it stand alone in its fullest meaning. Things are not done beautifully. The beauty is an integral part of their being done.
Robert Henri
#40. I don't want to fade away, I want to flame away - I want my death to be an attraction, a spectacle, a mystery. A work of art.
Jennifer Egan
#41. A work of art wastes away and becomes lustreless in surroundings where it has a price but not a value. It radiates only when surrounded by love. It is bound to wilt in a world where the rich have no time and the cultivated no money. But it never harmonizes with borrowed greatness.
Ernst Junger
#42. Anything approaching an explanation is always derogatory to a work of art.
Oscar Wilde
#43. All technologies are neutral. What counts is who uses them and what they use them for. Any material, any tool in the hands of an artist, can result in a work of art.
Ken Robinson
#44. If a work of art is rich and vital and complete, those who have artistic instincts will see its beauty, and those to whom ethics appeal more strongly than aesthetics will see its moral lesson. It will fill the cowardly with terror, and the unclean will see in it their own shame.
Oscar Wilde
#45. The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
#46. One thing living in Japan did for me was to make me feel that what is left out of a work of art is as important as, if not more important than, what is put in.
Katherine Paterson
#47. When you live under the power of terror and segregation, you can't ever start a work of art.
Jeanne Moreau
#48. There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.
Clive Bell
#49. A work of art expresses itself as a balance sheet pitting the spoken against the unspoken.
Russell Sherman
#50. ... it often occurs that a work of art - even though incomprehensible - remains in the mind, and produces its effect years later, when people are apt to remark that it was not the same as when they first saw it, transferring to the object under discussion the chance in themselves.
Walter Pach
#51. Art is nothing tangible. We cannot call a painting 'art' as the words 'artifact' and 'artificial' imply. The thing made is a work of art made by art, but not itself art. The art remains in the artist and is the knowledge by which things are made.
Ananda Coomaraswamy
#52. A work of art, so far as it is a work of art, cannot - whatever the artist's personal intention - advocate anything at all.
Susan Sontag
#53. Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.
Andre Maurois
#54. I love Monet: his 'Water Lilies' would look great on my wall. But would I prefer to see money helping kids get better from cancer rather than spending it on a work of art for my own personal indulgence? Yes, I probably would.
Bonnie Langford
#55. A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.
Clive Bell
#56. Write, write, write, and then write some more. Before you know it a work of art is before you
J.C. Brennan
#57. The only original part in a work of art is the infusion of the artist's own character, if he has one.
Austin O'Malley
#58. If a work of art is to explore new environments, it is not to be regarded as a blueprint but rather as a form of action-painting.
Marshall McLuhan
#59. A work of art is a renewable source of energy.
Brice Marden
#60. A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter ... one must paint its atmosphere.
Umberto Boccioni
#61. The past is a work of art, free of irrelevancies and loose ends ...
Max Beerbohm
#62. It could be argued that the reaction to a work of art is a creative act which is the counterpart of the action of the artist.
Frank Willett
#63. Without an element of vulgarity, no man can be a work of art ... I have to try and think what an artist is, apart from a hooligan who cannot live within his income of praise.
Quentin Crisp
#64. I feel I have a responsibility to myself, a responsibility to explain where we're coming from. Because a song or the performance of a song is a lot like a work of art.
Axl Rose
#65. Few people recognize that when they're moved by a work of art, they're moved by an artist's ability to solve a problem that is often a long-standing, timeless one.
Anonymous
#66. Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.
A. Bartlett Giamatti
#67. To create a work of art, great or small, is work, hard work, and work requires discipline and order.
Madeleine L'Engle
#68. ... what I told them was 'a poem,' a thing made by a maker, a work of art, part history of long ago, part invention.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#69. Art goes on in your head. If you said something interesting, that might be a title for a work of art and I'd write it down.
Damien Hirst
#70. I collect firearms, and I've got a Winchester, an Indian rifle. It has tacks for every warrior that was shot, like notches on a pistol, and it's got feathers and beads hanging off it. It's like a work of art.
Joe Perry
#71. As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art.
Ayn Rand
#72. A work of art is an act of love. Critics are crab lice.
David Gerrold
#73. To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was ...
Pablo Picasso
#74. Everybody has that feeling when they look at a work of art and it's right, that sudden familiarity, a sort of ... recognition, as though they were creating it themselves, as though it were being created through them while they look at it or listen to it ...
William Gaddis
#75. A thousand years makes economics silly and a work of art endures for ever, but it is very difficult to do and now it is not fashionable.
Ernest Hemingway,
#76. I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove ... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.
Joris-Karl Huysmans
#77. A work of art is never finished. It is merely abandoned.
E. M. Forster
#78. To believe in luck, you must believe that the universe is a roulette wheel and that instead of paying out to us what we have earned, it pays out only what it wishes. But it is not a spinning wheel of chance, it is a work of art, complete and framed by eternity.
Dean Koontz
#79. To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.
Leo Tolstoy
#80. If you can't make art, make your life a work of art.
Andre Malraux
#81. I would make my job a work of art. I would like whatever it is that I'm doing - everyone's experience of me, everyone's interaction with me, everyone's discussion, conversation, relationship with me - [to be] an event within which they get to see who they are. I would make of my life a work of art.
John Denver
#82. No matter how consummate a work of art may seem, it is only an approximation of the original conception. It is the artist's consciousness of this discrepancy between his conception and the realization that assures his progress.
Edgard Varese
#83. ...for, in [William] Morris's words, 'a work of utility might also be a work of art, if we cared to make it so.
Ewan Clayton
#85. What is more natural in a democratic age than that we should begin to measure the stature of a work of art-especially of a painting-by how widely and how well it is reproduced?
Daniel J. Boorstin
#86. Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.
Susan Sontag
#87. I don't feel like literature has the power to alienate. I think that's something people feel if they don't connect with a work of art. But I don't think a work of art can actively reject the person who's looking at it or reading it.
Eleanor Catton
#88. The English public takes no interest in a work of art until it is told that the work in question is immoral.
Oscar Wilde
#91. The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.
Edward Steichen
#92. You turn your life into a work of art in order to redeem the ordinariness - a condition you are stuck with.
Robert Dessaix
#93. Imitation is not inspiration, and inspiration only can give birth to a work of art. The least of man's original emanation is better than the best of borrowed thought.
Albert Pinkham Ryder
#94. What interests me most is when a work of art is no longer just an object, but also touches reality and life.
Miuccia Prada
#96. These guys are just flying through the air and I'm capturing them in the split second and putting it into a work of art, via clay to the bronze.
Richard MacDonald
#97. As soon as a work of art is of practical use, betrays a purpose or a tendency its beauty vanishes.
August Strindberg
#98. The malady of civilized man is his knowledge of death. The good artist, like the wise man, addresses himself to life and invests with his private vision the deeds and thoughts of men. The creation of a work of art, like an act of love, is our one small yes at the center of a vast no.
Gore Vidal
#99. Your life is a work of art that you will work on the rest of your life.
Richard Blanco
#100. A work of art is a form that articulates forces, making them intelligible.
Guy Davenport
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