Top 100 Quotes About Art And History
#1. Heraldry is the fusion of fact and fancy, myth and manner, romance and reality. It is an exuberant union of family, art, and history.
Charles Burnett
#2. I love doing normal things - movies, shopping, going out with friends, writing, reading, taking hot bubble baths - that's a big one for relaxation. I also love to go to art and history museums.
Christina Aguilera
#3. If you had to choose between art and the slogan, or between history and the slogan, you might as well choose the slogan and have done with pretending even to care about art and history. The reduction of all things to politics must reduce them, in their own right, to irrelevance.
Anthony Esolen
#4. The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!
Albert Einstein
#5. I would say if you are familiar with our history and the history of our art and literature that you see a clear cut pattern of people wanting to contribute, not only artistically, but in some practical purpose, for the benefits of the community.
Gil Scott-Heron
#6. I don't know why we, in the art world, cannot unpack things and sort of make hybrid notions of a practice. We're very rigid. It's funny, though; in music, we have no problem sampling, mixing and remixing. But in the art world, why can't we take little parts of history and mix it together?
Mark Bradford
#7. Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village.
Derek Walcott
#8. Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feeling
in a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman.
Will Durant
#9. Art history became an A-level option at my school the year I started sixth form. This happened because another student and I cajoled and bullied the head of the art department into arranging it with the examination board.
Sarah Hall
#10. Because I'm an art historian, I have some experience of writing that comes out of close attention. That's what really art history is. You're looking at something very closely, and you try to write in a meticulous way about it.
Teju Cole
#11. There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in Kindergarten through 5th grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts ... it is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text.
David Coleman
#12. Everyone knows of the talking artists. Throughout all of the known history of the world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They talk of art and are passionately,almost feverishly, in earnest about it. They think it matters much more than it does.
Sherwood Anderson
#13. I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.
Judy Chicago
#14. If I can't find a project that I'm really interested in, I'll just go back to college where I've been studying art history and French. I'm also going to study English and philosophy - the whole curriculum!
Emmy Rossum
#15. An artist can respect the backfield of fact before which every human being stands and choose not to address those facts.
Tom Bissell
#16. The modern tradition is the tradition of revolt. The French Revolution is still our model today: history is violent change, and this change goes by the name of progress. I do not know whether these notions really apply to art.
Octavio Paz
#17. An important document of the paper of record at a crucial, make-or-break juncture in its long, glorious history, and a love letter to the dying art form that is the great American newspaper.
Nathan Rabin
#18. People regard art too highly, and history not enough
John Irving
#19. I do believe abstraction is and was meant to embody deep emotion. I believe that's its job, in the history of art.
Sean Scully
#20. 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
#21. What's important about the artists we learn about in art history and see in all the art books is that they have somehow pushed the boundaries of what people think art is or should be, and that's how they've made their work relevant. That's what I'm trying to figure out for myself.
Kadir Nelson
#22. I wanted my art to deal with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the influence of African-American artists.
Rashid Johnson
#23. We feel more emotion ... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.
Chris Marker
#24. Captive Greece took captive her savage conquerer and brought the arts to rustic Latium
Horace
#25. With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art.
Peter Weiss
#26. For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.
David Salle
#27. In The Tricky Art of Co-Existing, Sandi Toksvig navigates life's little dilemmas with wit and not-so-common sense. You'll learn the strange history of common courtesy and the one true secret of social success: how to not drive everyone around you crazy.
William Poundstone
#28. How could one of the most important and unbelievable moments in art history - not to mention the history of a world war - simply become a forgotten footnote? But that's exactly what happened.
Robert M. Edsel
#29. My mother supported my every artistic ambition. I don't wonder why. I'm beyond grateful. But when I think of my grandparents barely surviving the war, I feel so pampered. What an indulgence to be an artist. So this is it, this is all I can offer, to the living and to the dead.
Leela Corman
#30. 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
#31. As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use.
Ruth Benedict
#32. I've worked with more than 50 directors and I've paid attention since day one. That's pretty much been my education, apart from studying art history and shooting with my own cameras. I've seen 50 different sets of mistakes and 50 different ways of achieving.
Tommy Lee Jones
#33. Man simply cannot live as the time-animal and the art-animal that he is, without history.
Carlton J. H. Hayes
#34. Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.
Peter Drucker
#35. My family always encouraged my drawing ability. Kids in school who teased me about my reading would get out of their seats and stand behind my desk as I worked and go, 'Wow, you can really draw.' Later, I earned a degree in Fine Art and got a Ph.D. in Art History.
Patricia Polacco
#36. The advantage of having an artistic tradition is that the younger artist could see an organic link between the real life of one's country and its art work which is a sublimation of that life.
Kuo Pao Kun
#37. Drawing from art history and mythology allows me to connect with viewers in a familiar, yet loose visual framework. Blending disparate histories and themes can give the overall presentation a recognizable, yet unique flavor.
John Dyer Baizley
#38. I love going to art galleries. The Tate Modern is one of my favourite things to do. But I don't invest in the history of it and I don't read up on it. I am a guy who would buy a print rather than buy an original.
James McAvoy
#39. I went to college to be a jock and to play on the baseball team. And then, I got cut and realized that that was it for that. I was really small. The other guys were really big, on that team. I was a bit of a theater nerd, and I was an art history major.
Charlie Day
#40. Music, art, writing - it gives us a sense of who we are, a sense of our history, a sense of our future and it should provide some kind of comfort. It's not just entertainment for entertainment's sake, it's an investment.
Sheryl Crow
#41. School was rough for me. I was a good student in middle school, but high school wasn't so fun. I still pulled through, though! I excelled in art, fashion, history and English literature - anything creative. Math and science I struggled a bit more in.
India De Beaufort
#42. The golden section was discovered by the Egyptians, and has been used in art and architecture, most commonly, during the classical ages of Egypt and Greece.
Steven L. Griffing
#43. Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.
Auguste Rodin
#44. 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
#45. I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal, state, and local levels.
Camille Paglia
#46. If you study the history of mankind, it seems to be a history of violence. Certainly the history of art, whether you look at paintings or movies or plays or whatever, is just a litany of murder and death.
Ethan Hawke
#47. Life is nothing until it is lived; but it is yours to make sense of, and the of it is nothing other than the sense you choose.
Jean-Paul Sartre
#48. But why? Why do you care about our class's history?"
"I just do. Besides, I need something to put on my art-school applications besides 'Locks self in room and draws all day.' Even art schools won't take a psychopath.
Natalie Standiford
#49. Perhaps we might, within the anatomy of our imaginations, think once more of the naked body as a vessel of grace, taste and wonder. In the spotted history of art, stranger things have happened.
Robert Genn
#50. The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic.
Lorenzo Ghiberti
#51. Only by assuming an infinitesimally small unit for observation - a differential of history (that is, the common tendencies of men) - and arriving at the art of integration (finding the sum of the infinitesimals) can we hope to discover the laws of history.
Leo Tolstoy
#52. 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
#53. What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.
Johan Huizinga
#54. I was born in the '60s and grew up in the '70s - not exactly the best decade for food in British history. It was horrendous. It was a time when, as a nation, we excelled in art and music and acting and photography and fashion - all creative skills ... all apart from cooking.
Heston Blumenthal
#55. I was drawn to biology and history and, of course, art. And I loved languages. The biggest problem I had is that I wasn't taught about the connections between all these things. I think that would have given life a lot more meaning and it would be a lot more enjoyable.
Hussein Chalayan
#56. Utrip makes it easy for travelers to experience the destination highlights that most interest them, be it food, art or history. Just like a culinary experience, every palate is different, and Utrip is all about personalizing travel for their users.
Tom Douglas
#57. You see, Suzanne, history lectures bore me, art films bore me, your friends bore me, and, if you want to know the truth, I guess you bore me too.
Francine Pascal
#58. There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.
Ansel Adams
#59. 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
#60. Art thieves steal more than beautiful objects; they steal memories and identities. They steal history.
Robert K. Wittman
#61. I guess art itself is insane. Its actual function is rarely clear, and yet people give their hearts and souls and lives to it, and have for all of history.
Damien Chazelle
#62. Do you know that every great thing in the history of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?
John Fowles
#63. History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created.
William Morris
#64. Art has done many things in human history, but in the last century especially, it has primarily tried to bother and provoke us. To force us to see things differently. Art changes. Its very purpose, we might say, is to change, and to change us along with it.
Ian Bogost
#65. In your opinion, where do private and political life, personal history and History meet? You know the answer, Maya. You say it unhesitatingly - in art and literature.
Abdourahman A. Waberi
#66. Reps once took chances on art, History's most treasured musicians were believed in and cultivated to reach their potential. Today, it would be difficult for those musicians to get deals.
Steve Vai
#67. When you examine the genesis of great works of art, successful start-ups, and revolutionary shifts in politics, you can always trace back a history of monetary and nonmonetary exchange, the hidden patrons and underlying favors.
Amanda Palmer
#68. I think whatever art form you're in, whether TV, film or theater, you should know the history of who came before you and how the art form has changed or not changed and to learn from the greats.
Kevin Chamberlin
#70. 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
#71. I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I'm in. I can also be a beach bum - I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown.
Cherie Lunghi
#72. 'The Art of the Brick' is an exhibition I've done where I've taken some works of art from art history and replicated them all out of Lego bricks.
Nathan Sawaya
#73. The art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history are; the work of living men not superseding, but building itself upon the work of the past.
John Ruskin
#74. I believe that all of these studies, activities and outings are memorable in their own way, and that they do have subtle effects on our lives. On a deep level, what we see as art, hear as music and learn as history touches us and we are moved.
Kytka Hilmar-Jezek
#75. And now it seems she's on my wavelength. That's all I need. My mind isn't much of a comfort to me but at least I thought it was private.
Russell Hoban
#76. 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
#77. The more I've gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I've turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.
Natasha Trethewey
#78. In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.
Edgard Varese
#79. Art has no answers, only solutions, and resolutions... Art has only vision and revision... Art has only hope and more hope... again and again, against circumstance and history... What we hope life might be, again and again, against what we see it has been. In hope, there is a reason to continue.
Israel Horovitz
#80. Life doesn't just happen; it's constructed through the history of power. And that's something I am interested in and so is the art world: a world that's trying to engage socially, with a leftist slant, to work out how we got here.
Mike Mills
#81. I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist.
LeRoy Neiman
#82. He showed videotape of himself committing acts of self-violence and informing news crews that he had been assaulted by a marauding mob of irate art historians.
Johnny Rich
#83. A Grecian history, perfectly written should be a complete record of the rise and progress of poetry, philosophy, and the arts.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#84. It is a story of utopian dreams and belief in the future, but also one that involves a critique of modernity.
Sverker Sorlin
#85. We are all of life
who stepped from the sea
trading weightless journeys of the currents
We are all of life
who build and tear down and build again
to find gold and silver
to find scars that weep and bleed
to step from the sea
to stay with the sea
Tamara Rendell
#86. Every school boy and school girl who has arrived at the age of reflection ought to know something about the history of the art of printing.
Horace Mann
#87. Perfume has a long and fascinating history and the beautifully crafted bottles used to store it over the centuries demonstrate its importance. Each has mirrored the latest tastes in fashion technology, design and art.
Judith Miller
#88. I graduated. I did History of Art, you know, all those things - American Studies - and then I went to art school, and I did Joseph Alvarez in the art school.
Peter Beard
#89. I would never want to write a character who was not thoroughly herself or himself. She's a very specific creature in my mind, and she has her thoughts, which range from skin to American history, philosophy, and the arts.
Lynne Tillman
#90. Why would anyone even bring up the issue (of the statues) in a country where there are more than 10 state-owned institutions that teach sculpting and more than 20 others that teach the history of art?
Gamal El-Ghitani
#91. In the 'Garnethill' trilogy, people always forget that Maureen O'Donnell's dad was a journalist and she did art history at uni and her brother did law, but no-one ever thinks they're middle-class - they're just working class because they speak with accents.
Denise Mina
#92. The pernicious influence of the prize and medal giving in art is so great that it should be stopped. History proves that juries in art have been generally wrong.
Robert Henri
#93. I was at one point thinking about being an art historian, when I was in school. And not being an artist, but I decided I was going to be an artist but I'm really mad for art history and the masters mostly.
Robert Barry
#94. Love finds lazy writers
And makes example out of them
Nailing them in history
Yarro Rai
#95. I spend much more time looking at art history and at different references to art than I do at actual objects.
Jeff Koons
#96. When you look at the paintings at Chauvet Cave, they're not primitive or like children's little scribbles, it bursts on the scene fully accomplished and when you look through the faces of cultural history, art history, it has never gotten any better.
Werner Herzog
#97. In the history of mankind, the fine art of killing one another in a civilized and uniformed manner has been elusive.
Richard Marsden
#98. The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field.
Toru Takemitsu
#99. The notions of hybridity, metissage, cosmopolitanism have been deployed and reworked in order to capture the polycentric and polysemic aspects of these new configurations.
Okwui Enwezor
#100. Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth.
Anne Fortier
