Quotes About Meaning Of Art

#1. People understand the meaning of eating lies in the nourishment of the body only when they cease to consider that the object of that activity is pleasure ... People understand the meaning of art only when they cease to consider that the aim of that activity is beauty, i.e., pleasure.

Leo Tolstoy

#2. Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.

Freya Stark

#3. Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.

Alfred Stieglitz

#4. If I knew what the meaning of art was, I wouldn't tell you.

Pablo Picasso

#5. To help, to continually help and share, that is the sum of all knowledge; that is the meaning of art.

Eleonora Duse

#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. Puzzles are like songs - A good puzzle can give you all the pleasure of being duped that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning, and the catharsis of solution.

Stephen Sondheim

#8. Some songs you get. Some songs you may not. And I think that's the beauty of art: to question and to ask, to understand the deeper meaning after two or three or four listenings.

Janelle Monae

#9. The immortality of great art seems bound up with the inevitable loss of its original surface meaning and its rebirth in the spirit of every new age.

Anton Ehrenzweig

#10. Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect, but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.

Alexander Calder

#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. The inner drama is the meaning of the exterior event.

Aaron Siskind

#13. The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents the true reality, not external aspects.

Aristotle.

#14. Thou art but a feeble flower in the garden of the universe, yet thou hath a purpose much greater than thyself.

Raneem Kayyali

#15. The purpose of activism and art, or at least of mine, is to make a world in which people are producers of meaning, not consumers, and

Rebecca Solnit

#16. Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.

John Ortberg

#17. 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

#18. Art should be expressed without objectification.It's more than just attraction. Creative expression is not "art for art's sake" but art that breathes true meaning.

Henry Johnson Jr

#19. Secrets can actually be quite important. A work of art that reveals its meaning or its power too quickly is uninteresting. It might not even be a good work of art.

Thomas Koerfer

#20. The deflation, or flattening out, of values in Modern art does not necessarily indicate an ethical nihilism. Quite the contrary; in opening our eyes to the rejected elements of existence, art may lead us to a more complete and less artificial celebration of the world.

William Barrett

#21. She gave life a meaning.
She was art, dressed like a painters pallet, bright and unaware of how goddam beautiful she could be turned into; with the right touch, her smile was the brush and her story was the canvas.

Nikki Rowe

#22. In this crazy mirror of terror and art a pseudo-quotation made up of obscure Shakespeareanisms (Chapter Three) somehow produces, despite its lack of literal meaning, the blurred diminutive image of the acrobatic performance that so gloriously supplies the bravura ending for the next chapter.

Vladimir Nabokov

#23. When I was a kid, toe dancing and toe shoes had a meaning in our culture as a serious kind of art.

Twyla Tharp

#24. She knocked a third time, three regular strokes, gentle, but perfectly distinct, and with meaning in them; for, modulate it with what cautious art we will, the hand cannot help playing some tune of what we feel , upon the senseless wood.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

#25. Poetry connects us to what is deepest in ourselves. It gives us access to our own feelings, which are often shadowy, and engages us in the art of making meaning. It widens the space of our inner lives. It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable (though not incomprehensible) event in language.

Edward Hirsch

#26. But one of the attributes of love, like art, is to bring harmony and order out of chaos, to introduce meaning and affect where before there was none, to give rhythmic variations, highs and lows to a landscape that was previously flat.

Molly Haskell

#27. In interpreting a work of art, we draw upon our own aims and endeavors, inform it with a meaning that has its origin in our own ways of life and thought. In a word, any art that really affects us becomes to that extent modern art.

Arnold Hauser

#28. The end (goal) of art is to figure the hidden meaning of things and not their appearance; for in this profound truth lies their true reality, which does not appear in their external outlines.

Joseph Conrad

#29. All around the recognized word and the comprehended sentence, the other graphisms take flight, carrying with them the visible plenitude of shape and leaving only the linear, successive unfurling of meaning
not one drop of rain falling after another, much less a feather or a torn-of leaf.

Michel Foucault

#30. We are liable to miss the best of life if we do not know how to tingle, if we do not learn to hoist ourselves just a little higher than we generally are in order to sample the rarest and ripest fruit of art which human thought has to offer.

Vladimir Nabokov

#31. But we must be aware that art cannot be used to show the validity of Christianity; it should rather be the reverse. Christianity is true; things and actions and human endeavor only get their meaning from their relationship to God.

H.R. Rookmaaker

#32. There are many ways to find meaning in life, one of them is the love of art

Ndiritu Wahome

#33. In art, the Trinity is expressed in the Creative Idea, the Creative Energy, and the Creative Power - the first imagining of the work, then the making incarnate of the work, and third the meaning of the work.

Dorothy L. Sayers

#34. 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

#35. There are those who think that Zeffirelli's Hamlet is the way to treat Shakespeare. I think that cinema can handle much more. We somehow expect cinema to provide us with meaning, to console us. But that's not the purpose of art.

Peter Greenaway

#36. A work of art enters life very much like another human being - complicated, loaded with overtones and meaning, mysterious, enticing, obsessive, and beautiful. There's no way to control how it will be used, how it will be read, and that's part of the excitement of it.

Budd Hopkins

#37. There is a close connection between art and religion in the sense that both are concerned about questions of meaning - if not about the meaning of existence generally, then certainly about the meaning of one's individual life and how a person relates to his or her total community/environment.

Freeman Patterson

#38. The meaning of culture is nothing less than the conduct of life itself, fortified, thickened, made more crafty and subtle, by contact with books and with art.

John Cowper Powys

#39. A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between the contradictory answers.

Leonard Bernstein

#40. Artists are interpreters for us of richness and meaning. Artists can reinforce a healthy sense of God's grandeur and nearness.

Sandra Bowden

#41. It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Anais Nin

#42. Unfortunately, the boards of art institutions tend to be populated with well-meaning supporters of the arts who often lack any business background or appetite for imposing appropriate discipline.

Eli Broad

#43. A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, 'The Clock' is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself - something almost inhuman.

Jerry Saltz

#44. What is art? ( ... ) Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life - love and sacrifice.

Andrei Tarkovsky

#45. The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.

Camille Paglia

#46. I lived through being pooh-poohed by fine art galleries, saying, "Digital is going to destroy the meaning behind photos." The motion side, the moment all of the cameras come alive with that motion, it was like a dream come true. It enables people to economically experiment with film.

Russell James

#47. What do you mean by meant? Given the final futility of our struggle, is the fleeting jolt of meaning that art gives us valuable? Or is it the only value passing time as comfortably as possible?

John Green

#48. I suppose I have come to realize that entertainment is not easily dismissed. Beyond the meaning (of a work of art), it is important to people. Without it, lives can be dull.

Stan Lee

#49. Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power ... Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.

Abraham Joshua Heschel

#50. Art - the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.

Lawrence Durrell

#51. Artists are prophets. They define the meaning of our lives and point the way.

Tony Bouza

#52. We, this nation of ours, could be the richest nation in the world. We could be the freest nation in the world - but only if the arts are alive and flourishing can we experience the true meaning of our freedom, and know the full glory of the human spirit.

Richard M. Nixon

#53. To feel the meaning of what one is doing, and to rejoice in that meaning; to unite in one concurrent fact the unfolding of the inner life and the ordered development of material conditions
that is art.

John Dewey

#54. Art should startle the viewer into thinking about the meaning of life.

Antoni Tapies

#55. Each one of these bodies (art-works Arp made) certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name.

Hans Arp

#56. Whatever you do in life, there's content and form; only those two put together create special meaning of a great work of art or great interpretation of music or a great story that you tell.

Itay Talgam

#57. There's a side that I want to do just like really retarded arty films like parody, pretentious art films that kind of are supposed to have some deep meaning.

Andy Milonakis

#58. We are living in a very complex society. It puts me in a complex frame of thinking.

Ai Weiwei

#59. Theory has nothing to do with a work of art. Pictures which are interpretable, and which contain a meaning, are bad pictures. A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless.

Gerhard Richter

#60. No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

T. S. Eliot

#61. In the example of the navigator, no writing was essential to draw the meaning of observing the object at a distance from the ship. In the real the
observation has been noted and that is enough to give it a meaning, a subjective meaning, a meaning exclusively important for the navigator himself.

Anuradha Bhattacharyya

#62. I've certainly faced some raw, real pain in my life. I lost my father to a car accident when I was young. My mother died ten years ago. My son was very sick as an infant. Eventually, I have attempted to transform this pain into art, to make meaning out of it.

Dani Shapiro

#63. She danced because she needed to. She needed to say things which could be said in no other way, and she needed to take her meaning and her living from the saying of them.

Spider Robinson

#64. Music is the biggest tool of revolution - the best way to reach out to the youth and involve them. If you can't contribute to the world with your art, I don't see the meaning of life.

Kailash Kher

#65. You can see the meaning of the statement that "Literature is a living art" most easily and clearly, perhaps, by contrasting Science and Art at their two extremes - say Pure Mathematics and Acting. Science as a rule deals with things, Art with man's thought and emotion about things.

Arthur Quiller-Couch

#66. The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living.

Viktor E. Frankl

#67. Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness ... meaning at-oneness, the state of being at one with the object.

D.H. Lawrence

#68. It's a shame when other people's gambling habits change the meaning of paintings or when fluctuations of value start to dictate how people perceive art because it's too expensive to be interesting or moving. That's when I get bummed out.

Nate Lowman

#69. It's just a combination of letters I liked. And when your whole art's based on the lettering you choose, you kinda figure out what ones work together. I just liked the shapes of the k, a, w, s. It has no meaning.

KAWS

#70. My heart was full and uplifted; it seemed that in my soul the question arose whether such things as Art, literature, science encompassed and completed life or whether there was still something in the distance which encompassed it even more completely and filled it with a far greater happiness.

Adalbert Stifter

#71. The idea of the culture that you live in determining meaning in your art, though, is a very important aspect of what art would be about. But that had more to do with the kind of general understanding of what the hell you're doing, you know.

Robert Barry

#72. Art and music shine a light of meaning on ordinary life, and through them we are able to confront the things that trouble us and to find consolation and peace in their presence.

Roger Scruton

#73. We make art so that we can feel life. We do science to understand it.

Preeti Bhonsle

#74. Beauty, which I admit to being in pursuit of, is an extremely suspect word among many in the art world. But I don't think you can get along without it. It's the confirmation of meaning in life.

Robert Adams

#75. At the end of time I want my art to stand up and my soul to bow down.

Rob Ryser

#76. Fashion is something you attach to yourself, put on, and through that interaction the meaning of it is born. Without the wearing of it, it has no meaning, unlike a piece of art. It is fashion because people want to buy it now, because they want to wear it now, today. Fashion is only the right now.

Rei Kawakubo

#77. Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Eric Gill

#78. 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

#79. Great art projects a sense of inexhaustibility. In literature, particularly in poetry, this may be accomplished through ambiguity: Beneath each and every meaning that I can descry lie others, so that rereading holds out the prospect of new subtleties, inversions, secret codes and ineffabilities

William T. Vollmann

#80. It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose - a political, social and religious purpose - that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs

George Orwell

#81. In the four hundred years since the last devouring soul appeared; the last man to know the meaning of ecstasy, there has been a constant and steady decline of man in art, in thought, in action. The world is pooped out: there isn't a dry fart left.

Henry Miller

#82. Only work which is the product of inner compulsion can have spiritual meaning.

Walter Gropius

#83. In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.

Antoni Tapies

#84. Beautiful is the man who leaves a legacy that of shared love and life. It is he who transfers meaning, assigns significance and conveys in his loving touch the fine art and gentle shaping of a life. This man shall be called, Father.

Stella Payton

#85. Economy: that what you played had to have meaning, not just a bunch of sixteenth notes. You learn to make better choices of notes as you get older.

Art Farmer

#86. You came to me to learn the Pleasure of Life and the Pleasure of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow and its beauty.

Oscar Wilde

#87. The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Pope Paul VI

#88. In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

George Orwell

#89. Science and art, ... they seek the truth and the meaning of life, they seek God, [and] the soul, and when they are harnessed to passing needs and activities, ... then they only complicate and encumber life.

Anton Chekhov

#90. For me, meaning of design is to give soul to objects by Art. Art sometimes need to be in every part of daily life, not only in the galleries and museums.

Baris Gencel

#91. In art, one does not aim for simplicity; one achieves it unintentionally as one gets closer to the real meaning of things.

Constantin Brancusi

#92. Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification.

Albert Camus

#93. I know. You think you love art because you have a sensitive soul.
Isn't a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain?
You think art has meaning. You think you're not like me.

Rabih Alameddine

#94. The appreciation of the merits of art of the emotions it conveys depends upon an understanding of the meaning of life ...

Leo Tolstoy

#95. I feel that works of art are an opportunity for people to construct meaning, so I don't usually tell what they mean. It conveys to people that they have to participate.

Jasper Johns

#96. My study of religion, which I regard in many ways as an art form, is a search for meaning.

Karen Armstrong

#97. At this time of year it's easy to forget the true meaning of Christianity - the lies, the corruption, the abuse.

Banksy

#98. I have been speculating last night what makes a man a discoverer of undiscovered things. As far as I can conjecture the art consists in habitually searching for the causes and meaning of everything which occurs.

Charles Darwin

#99. It isn't enough to have had an interesting or hilarious or tragic life. Art isn't anecdote. It's the consciousness we bring to bear on our lives. For what happened in the story to transcend the limits of the personal, it must be driven by the engine of what the story means.

Cheryl Strayed

#100. He [an earnest young reporter] seemed to share the view of many intelligent, well-educated, well-meaning people that, while adult literature may aim to be art, the object of children's books is to whip the little rascals into shape.

Katherine Paterson