Top 100 Quotes About Expression In Art
#1. Every mind which has given itself to self-expression in art is aware of a directing agency outside its conscious control which it has agreed to label 'inspiration'.
Norman Lindsay
#2. I felt the strange brooding lonely presence of Nature fostering a new race, a new age, and as part of it, a new expression in Art. It was an unfolding of the heart itself through the effect of environment, of people, of place, and time.
Lawren Harris
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. I love deeply and admire the beauties of life and its expression in many different art forms. I am an aesthetic philosopher.
Debasish Mridha
#6. To me art means power to sway people not with my words but with a mere picture. Art means expression, not my own but of the subjects. Art means truth; because when you see a picture you see all that is real. Art is exposure, showing things in a way they haven't been seen before.
CV
#7. Everyone who has any talent at all in sketching, painting, sculpturing or carving, should have the opportunity to use that talent. The expression is important for the person, and can tremendously enrich the lives of other people. What can you do?
Edith Schaeffer
#8. All art speaks in signs and symbols. No one can explain how it happens that the artist can waken to life in us the existence that he has seen and lives through. No artistic speech is the adequate expression of what it represents; its vital force comes from what is unspoken in it.
Albert Schweitzer
#9. Wonder, and its expression in poetry and the arts, are among the most important things which seem to distinguish men from other animals, and intelligent and sensitive people from morons.
Alan Watts
#10. Since art is the expression of beauty and beauty can be understood only in the form of the material elements of the true idea it contains, art has become almost uniquely feminine. Beauty is woman, and also art is woman.
Remy De Gourmont
#11. 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
#12. We express our art in everything we say, everything we feel, and everything we do. The creation is ongoing, it is endless, it is happening in every moment.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
#13. My real background was in art studies. At the beginning I was a painter, then I was this graphic designer, then I became an illustrator, then I was a comic artist. But for me it's a different way of expression, a different field of art. They're not separated; everything for me is related.
Marjane Satrapi
#14. War stories deal in death. War illuminates love, while love is the greatest expression of hope, without which any story rings untrue to life. And to deny hope in a story about such darkness is to create false art.
Richard Flanagan
#15. 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
#16. Art is the expression of the profoundest thoughts in the simplest way.
Albert Einstein
#17. The error in the art-genre of Opera consists herein: a Means of expression (Music) has been made the end, while the End of expression (the Drama) has been made a means.
Richard Wagner
#18. Whereas Freud was for the most part concerned with the morbid effects of unconscious repression, Jung was more interested in the manifestations of unconscious expression, first in the dream and eventually in all the more orderly products of religion and art and morals.
Lewis Mumford
#19. There is always some accident in the best things, whether thoughts or expressions or deeds. The memorable thought, the happy expression, the admirable deed are only partly ours.
Henry David Thoreau
#20. An artist must be pure of heart," said Gerdes, "for true art is the expression of the artist's innermost being. To create beauty, one must be beautiful" - she pressed her hands to her bosom - "in here, in your heart of hearts.
Stephen R. Lawhead
#21. I started to understand that for me, art was no longer about self-expression but about creative engagement with the world. I started to respond in an excited way to making work inside an industry and not feeling the constraints of audience expectation as some kind of thing that I should avoid.
Ayad Akhtar
#22. We all do things in a certain individual way, according to our temperaments.
Every human act - no matter how large or how small - is a direct expression of
a man's personality, and bears the inevitable impress of his nature.
S. S. Van Dine
#23. I feel this society somewhere has lost its sense of what art is. Art is expression. In expression, you need 100% full freedom and our freedom to express our art is seriously being fucked with. Fuck, the word 'fuck' has many connotations as does the word 'art'.
Kurt Cobain
#24. I truly, genuinely like clothes. Making them is an art form, and wearing them is a form of self-expression. I find it very emotional because I can remember moments in my life - my mood, how I felt - through these clothes.
Diane Kruger
#25. Dance in this century has remained primarily a personal ritual operating, like most avant-garde art, as an idiosyncratic form rather than a tribal expression of religious powers or a corporate expression of societal values.
Jamake Highwater
#26. Inspiration in Science may have to do with ideas, but not in Art. In art it is in the senses that are instinctively responsive to the medium of expression.
Arthur Erickson
#27. In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said ... of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements of a work of art are, often, its silences.
Susan Sontag
#29. If an artist wants to be original, he should not look to art for inspiration, for art seeks its model in life, not art - and only life is rich enough to simulate originality.
Anthony Marais
#30. Shahid has grown increasingly committed to the art of indignation, waking up in the morning with an expression of incipient disgust already in stock for all the affronts he will surely encounter during the course of the day.
Sara Suleri
#31. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that art, as such, does not "pay," to use an American expression - at least, not in the beginning - and that the art that has to pay its own way is apt to become vitiated and cheap.
Antonin Dvorak
#32. My inspiration's coming from nature, I love nature and all the expressions, I love art, I love expressions of beauty. It's part of my life, being engaged in the moment.
Rickson Gracie
#33. All martial arts is simply an honest expression of one's body - with a lot of deception in between.
Bruce Lee
#34. 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
#35. With a leer of mingled sweetness and slyness; with one eye on the future, one on the bride, and an arch expression in her face, partly spiritual, partly spirituous, and wholly professional and peculiar to her art; Mrs Gamp rummaged in her pocket again [ ... ]
Charles Dickens
#36. The sublime in art is the attempt to express the infinite without finding in the realm of phenomena any object which proves itself fitting for this representation.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
#37. A critical discourse that had respect for the mystery of art would look to the sense of life which finds expression in paradox, metaphor, tautology, and syntax.
Denis Donoghue
#38. The subject may be crude and repulsive. Its expression is artistically modulated and balanced. This is style. This is art. This is the only thing that really matters in books.
Vladimir Nabokov
#39. Each man must take the material that he finds at hand, see that in it there are the big truths of life, the fundamentally big forces, and then express in his art whatever is the cause of his pleasure.
Robert Henri
#40. There are infinite modes of expression in the world of art, and to insist that only by one road can the artist attain his ends is to limit him.
Jacob Epstein
#41. It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.
Albert Einstein
#42. Forgiveness is the nature of my art in general. It's expressing love and compassion, the kinds of things that don't make sense in any other context other than emotive expression.
Raymond Pettibon
#43. Every art expression is rooted fundamentally in the personality and temperament of the artist.
Hans Hofmann
#44. If you love beauty, it's because beauty lives within you. If you love art, it's because you are creative. If it wakes up your heart, a receptor for it already exists within you. Your soul is drawn to the things that will help you unfold your most glorious expression. Give in.
Cynthia Occelli
#45. Technique should be taught, not as an end in itself, but as something
related to individual expression, as a means toward an end. One cannot
separate technique from expression. There is only expression.
Kimon Nicolaides
#46. In every human being there is the artist, and whatever his activity, he has an equal chance with any to express the result of his growth and his contact with life. I don't believe any real artist cares whether what he does is 'art' or not. Who, after all, knows what art is?
Robert Henri
#47. The thought came to me that all one loves in art becomes beautiful. Beauty is nothing but the expression of the fact that something is being loved. Only thus could she be defined.
Robert Musil
#48. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#49. The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalizing this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive, and every work of art should be alive.
Hans Hofmann
#50. The amiable is the voluptuous in expression or manner. The sense of pleasure in ourselves is that which excites it in others; or, the art of pleasing is to seem pleased.
William Hazlitt
#51. It is always understood as an expression of condemnation when anything in Literature or Art is said to be done for effect; and yet to produce an effect is the aim and end of both.
George Henry Lewes
#52. Don't be afraid of expressing what you really mean in your art, what you really feel. Say it visually, as strongly as you can. Push as far a reach as you can, then go all the way!
Kay WalkingStick
#53. Sketching is the breath of art: it is the most refreshing of all the more impulsive forms of creative self-expression and, as such, it should be as free, and happy, as a song in the bath.
Mervyn Levy
#54. Self-expression is a hallmark of an artist, of art, to get something off one's chest, to sing one's song. So that element is present in all art. It is the key to even standing up and saying, "Hey, listen to me." Self-expression can be based on looking at the world and making observations about it.
George Carlin
#55. Beyond racing, I just love the art form of running, of conceiving new ideas like the 50 Marathons in 50 States in 50 Days. It's the ultimate expression of what I love to do, which is run, and travel, and see this great country.
Dean Karnazes
#56. Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity to break out of nature's narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science.
Allan Bloom
#57. Christian art is the expression of the whole life of the whole person as a Christian. What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life. Art is not to be solely a vehicle for some sort of self-conscious evangelism.
Francis A. Schaeffer
#58. I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.
Mark Rothko
#59. In a way, composing on the melodic level is an expression of a melodic truth, almost like a geometric truth. If it has clarity, other people will recognize it. There's no way of isolating it in a gallery on a white wall and saying, "This is a work of art. This is a mathematical proof."
Eyvind Kang
#60. Most art in the world does not have a capital 'A,' but is a way of turning everyday objects into personal expressions.
Gloria Steinem
#61. For me art and chess are closely related, both are forms in which the self finds beauty and expression.
Vladimir Kramnik
#62. I guess I'm pretty lucky because in childhood I studied so many martial arts styles and I never stopped researching them, my body is very adjustable and I can turn into different expressions with my body.
Donnie Yen
#63. A lot of us have all sorts of ideas, and we select some rather than others and give expression to those ... and some works of art are more successful than others. Some languish in obscurity and are never heard of again, while others form the foundation of a whole school of art.
Rupert Sheldrake
#64. Art is the most valued thing in the world ... it is the expression of the highest form of human energy,the creative power nearest to the divine.The power is within - the question is how to reach it.
Arthur Wesley Dow
#65. All great art is the expression of man's delight in God's work, not his own.
John Ruskin
#66. Progress comes by experiment, and this from ennui that leads to voyages, wars, revolutions, and plainly to change in the arts of expression; that cries out to the imagination, and is the nurse of the invention whereof we term necessity the mother.
Edmund Clarence Stedman
#67. 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
#68. A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.
Ansel Adams
#69. There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost.
Martha Graham
#70. It has become progressively clearer that the plastic expression of true reality is attained through dynamic movement in equilibrium. Plastic art affirms that equilibrium can only be established through the balance of unequal but equivalent oppositions.
Piet Mondrian
#71. Expression, expression is the thing - in art. I do not care what it expresses, and I cannot most always sometimes tell, generally, but expression is what I worship, it is what I glory in, with all my impetuous nature.
Mark Twain
#72. Art is the expression of a man's life, of his mode of being, of his relations with the universe, since it is, in fact, man's inarticulate answer to the universe's unspoken message.
Vernon Lee
#73. The art of life is to live in the present moment and to make that moment as perfect as we can by the realization that we are the instruments and expression of God himself.
Emmet Fox
#74. A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.
Mark Twain
#75. My short answer would be that there is no greatest jazz musician of the century. Jazz, like any valid art form, finds its greatness in its expression of the human spirit, and, to me, this can't be reduced to a contest.
Bennie Wallace
#76. As sounds in a musical composition can be used not to express physical objects but ideas, emotions, harmonies, rhythmic orders and most any expression of the human mind and spirit, so light can be used visually to express the mind and spirit.
Wynn Bullock
#77. There are some people who may not like precision in their art. They may like it to be grittier and more gestural, more of a direct expression in the way that a painter would put his strokes on canvas.
Adrian Tomine
#78. Skateboarding is as much, or more, an art of mode of expression than it is a sport. What skateboarding has given me is precisely that: a form of expression that drew me to it, and, in so doing, I was able to express and be who I wanted to be through it, in a sense.
Rodney Mullen
#79. Art is not about beauty, art is an expression.
Vikram Roy
#80. An art dies when it describes itself instead of life - when it turns from the expression of man's feelings in the void, to a mere description of the void.
Jack Kerouac
#81. Dance means different things to different people". It is a blend of Nritta, Nritya and Natya. It is a poetic expression which tells stories to people, a subtle interfusion of drama in an otherwise classical pattern.
Shallu Jindal
#82. In every race, in every nation, and in every clime in every period of history there is always an eager-eyed group of youthful patriots who seriously set themselves to right the wrongs done to their race or nation or ... art or self-expression.
Alice Dunbar Nelson
#83. With few exceptions, music has been for some centuries the art which has devoted itself not to the reproduction of natural phenomena, but rather to the expression of the artist's soul, in musical sound.
Wassily Kandinsky
#84. Sometimes when you've reached a peak experience, you look for other peak experiences ... I'd always been interested in art. I was looking for other experiences outside of sports. Art was a form of expression I had always liked a great deal.
Bob Beamon
#85. Art that sells on production is bad art, essentially. It is art that is made to demand. It suits the public. The taste of the public is bad. The taste of the public is always bad. It is bad because it is not an individual expression, but merely a mania for assent, a mania to be 'in on it'.
Ezra Pound
#86. When I began making art, I just thought I liked it. As a woman who was placed in spaces with various conditions, conventions, and restrictions on self-expression, turning to art - whether visual art, writing novels, or writing articles - was to gain freedom from the space around me.
Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook
#87. In the art world, creativity involves aesthetic sensibility, emotional resonance and a gift for expression.
Edward De Bono
#88. The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms.
Oscar Wilde
#89. The ideal form for a poem, essay, or fiction, is that which the ideal writer would evolve spontaneously. One in whom the powers of expression fully responded to the state of feeling, would unconsciously use that variety in the mode of presenting his thoughts, which Art demands.
Herbert Spencer
#90. From space this Earth is incandescent with abominations - the gods write their signature in our entrails
Steve Aylett
#91. There's an expression, "God is in the details," and it applies to nothing more than it does to the writing of fiction. To that and to the art of telling good lies. And what is fiction but the telling of lies?
Donna Levin
#92. Works of art produced in the contemporary world are a further expression of that. But I don't think there is an active, ongoing nihilist self-consciousness in the artist.
Leonard Baskin
#93. It would be a serious oversight to limit our understanding of the impact of theology to strictly religious art, and overlook its pervasive role in shaping human understanding and artistic expression thereof within any given culture-regardless of the subject matter at hand.
John Walford
#94. As a consumer of culture, I like a wide range of emotions to be touched in art. It's funny but on the other side of it, I do feel that people that are trying to sell culture would like to see a narrower range of expression from their content-makers. Easier to sell I guess.
Erin McKeown
#95. No man has the right to dictate what other men should perceive, create or produce, but all should be encouraged to reveal themselves, their perceptions and emotions, and to build confidence in the creative spirit.
Ansel Adams
#96. Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.
Edward Hopper
#97. A lot of actors on film sets ... very often they're not paying attention to the physical world around them. I think through studying art, I've always had that awareness and that's something that I've wanted to bring in to go beyond acting ... As a form of expression, they are intrinsically linked.
Andy Serkis
#98. All that is good in art is the expression of one soul talking to another, and is precious according to the greatness of the soul that utters it.
John Ruskin
#99. You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.
Henri Matisse
#100. It's a creative enterprise, just like art, just like painting, music. Creating something can be done in different categories, so to do it in film is just another expression, which is great. Because it translates so well because so many people see the work, if you're lucky.
Robert Redford
