Top 100 Quotes About Truth In Art
#1. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow.
Oscar Wilde
#3. Art, though, is never the voice of a country; it is an even more precious thing, the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not comfort of any sort, but truth. And the art that speaks it most unmistakably, most directly, most variously, most fully, is fiction; in particular, the novel.
Eudora Welty
#4. The truth of art consists in its power to break the monopoly that those in power exercise by defining what is real.
Denis Donoghue
#5. All the art of analysis consists in saying a truth only when the other person is ready for it, has been prepared for it by an organic process of gradation and evolution ...
Anais Nin
#6. In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched by art, is a misshapen man. An incomplete man.
William Styron
#7. 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
#8. Words such as truth, art, veracity, or anything are stupid in themselves.
Marcel Duchamp
#9. I feel like a sailor, or better, like an explorer of the immense universe of art. The artist is a discoverer in search of the keys that open the door to emotions and feelings . Art is the place where rationality, fantasy, truth and fiction mix up in a detonating mixture.
Augusto De Luca
#10. I am quite certain in my heart of hearts that modern music and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practise it honestly, decently and with all their being.
Michael Tippett
#11. Art flies around truth, but with the definite intention of not getting burnt. Its capacity lies in finding in the dark void a place where the beam of light can be intensely caught, without this having been perceptible before.
Franz Kafka
#12. In truth, the best long-term explanations about our ancient counterparts can be found in the paintings, sculpture, crafts, tools of utility, language and architecture left behind. These are the building blocks of civilization we call culture. These are what we call 'the arts.
Edward J. Fraughton
#13. My art is just an effort to express the truth of my being in gesture and movement. It has taken me long years to find even one absolutely true movement.
Isadora Duncan
#14. Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth.
Gerhard Richter
#15. Praise excites my ego; love touches my heart.
I am in love with the universe and I praise nature's art.
Debasish Mridha
#16. The ideal itself is but truth clothed in the forms of art.
Octave Feuillet
#17. My thesis in terms of all my art is finding the beauty in the ugly truth. Just find the beauty in realism and what's there.
Nikki Jean
#18. Art does not exist only to entertain
but also to challenge one to think, to provoke, even to disturb, in a constant search for the truth.
Barbra Streisand
#19. War is fought in mystery. The truth can take days to travel, and ahead of truth flies rumor, and it is ever hard to know what is really happening, and the art of it is to pluck the clean bone of fact from the rotting flesh of fear and lies.
Bernard Cornwell
#20. Truth and politics do not and cannot mix because politics is the art of saying only what needs to be said - and saying it in just the right way - in order to achieve a desired end.
Neale Donald Walsch
#21. Art is an imagination, projection, and reflection of the mind in a particular form that society can internalize and enjoy.
Debasish Mridha
#22. We foresee no limit to scientific advancement in the future, and in scientific truth there is nothing dead; science is always a living and growing body of knowledge; but art on the contrary has many times run its course to an end, and exhausted its vital power.
George Edward Woodberry
#23. A lie is profanity. A lie is the worst thing in the world. Art is the ability to tell the truth.
Richard Pryor
#25. An exquisite invention this, Worthy of Love's most honeyed kiss,
This art of writing billet-doux
In buds, and odors, and bright hues! In saying all one feels and thinks In clever daffodils and pinks; In puns of tulips; and in phrases, Charming for their truth, of daisies.
Leigh Hunt
#26. So long as we exalt artists as beautiful liars or as the world's most profound truth-tellers, we remain locked in a moralistic paradigm that doesn't even begin to engage art's most exciting provinces (139).
Maggie Nelson
#27. For, Thou art righteous, O Lord, but we have sinned and committed iniquity, and have done wickedly, and Thy hand is grown heavy upon us, and we are justly delivered over unto that ancient sinner, the king of death; because he persuaded our will to be like his will whereby he abode not in Thy truth.
Augustine Of Hippo
#28. In truth, I wanted her to read my mind so I didn't have to stoop to the womanly art of articulation.
Gillian Flynn
#30. I absolutely refuse the fame part of my business. I refuse even the money side of my business. I try to do as good work as I can do, I try to grow in my art and reach for truth. That's what I want from my art, that's what I aspire to.
Connie Nielsen
#31. The truth of art lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality to define what is real.
Herbert Marcuse
#32. The core of understanding lies in the individual mind, and until that is touched everything is uncertain and superficial. Truth cannot be perceived until we come to fully understand our potential and ourselves. After all, knowledge in the martial arts ultimately means self-knowledge.
Bruce Lee
#33. Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#34. Very early in my life I took the question of the relation of art to truth seriously: even now I stand in holy dread in the face of this discordance. My first book was devoted to it. The Birth of Tragedy believes in art on the background of another belief
Friedrich Nietzsche
#35. The artist should preach nothing-not even his own autonomy. His art should speak its own truth, and in so doing it will be in harmony with every other kind of truth- moral, metaphysical, mystical.
Thomas Merton
#36. It is as we respond to the understandings and feelings inherent in ... art that we acquire much of our truth, much of our nobility and grace, and much of our pleasure.
Ursula Goodenough
#37. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence. Let it be the most obvious fabrication and you will still believe whatever truth is in it, because you can not deny truth no matter how shabbily it is dressed.
Orson Scott Card
#38. Perhaps cinema is the most personal art, the most intimate. In cinema only the author's intimate truth will be convincing enough for the audience to accept.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#39. Art is short for artificial ... so the art of art is to be as real as you can within this artificial situation ...
In a way it's a lie to get you to see the truth.
Joni Mitchell
#40. A piece of art, when completed, encapsulates its own reality. As its architect, the artist's task is to craft it well enough that the reader believes in its existence and is willing to enter, explore, and engage based on the artist's version of the truth, even if that truth is artifice.
Kate Kearns
#41. 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
#42. If thou art wise, incline to truth; for truth, not the semblance, remains in its place.
Saadi
#43. I saw more truth and sensitivity in art than I did in many of the people in this world.
Frederick Lenz
#44. To me defeat in anything is merely temporary. Defeat simply tells me that something is wrong in my doing; it is a path leading to success and truth.
Bruce Lee
#45. What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque.
Corin Nemec
#46. The one thing necessary in life, as in art is to tell the truth.
Leo Tolstoy
#47. There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character, that is to say, that which offers no outer or inner truth.
Auguste Rodin
#48. Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
#49. Not all artists have a responsibility to be socially or politically aware, but they do have a responsibility to make great art. They have to find some truth and put that in their music.
Michael Franti
#50. If you tell yourself the great lie of bad art-that you are in charge-your chance at the truth will be lost. The truth isn't always pretty.
Stephen King
#51. Dance is the most intimate art, the most unbrainy art, because it is done wholly with the body, which is so limited in its ability to speak anything but the truth.
Joan Acocella
#52. Art could be said to be a symbol of the universe, being linked with that absolute spiritual truth which is hidden from us in our positivistic, pragmatic activities.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#53. 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
#54. The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#56. Paul's the writer. Yeah, I wrote a little of that stuff, but that's just technically true. In spirit, and in essence of the truth, it doesn't matter. So I don't know, maybe I'm being foolish for not being technical. Yeah, I wrote a certain portion of the things.
Art Garfunkel
#57. I give a damn if any fan recalls my legacy, I'm trying to live life in the sight of GOD's memory.
Mos Def
#58. To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward.
Chris Campanioni
#59. Giving style to one's character - a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#60. I was joking earlier when I said that all writers are manic depressives, but it's a joke with a lot of truth behind it. For fiction writers and poets, too, there's something wrong with you and you do this art as a way of correcting it or addressing it in some way.
T.C. Boyle
#61. I don't care about truth; I care about art and style and writing and occupying the wall. For me, my writing style is very linked to the fact that it is a work of art on the wall. I had to find a way to write in concise, effective phrases that people standing or walking into a room could read.
Sophie Calle
#62. Truth is, I didn't know what the hell I was doing when I got out of Cal Arts. I think I wasted a lot of time not being bold enough, or still engaged in the questioning that you get into at school.
David Salle
#63. Truth and reality in art begin at the point where the artist ceases to understand what he is doing and capable of doing - yet feels in himself a force that becomes steadily stronger ... and more concentrated.
Henri Matisse
#64. Storytelling is the art of unfolding knowledge in a way that makes each piece contribute to a larger truth.
Philip Gerard
#65. When I write I don't aim to shock people, and I'm surprised when I do. But I don't think that anything that occurs in life should be omitted from art, though the artist should present it in a fashion that is artistic and not ugly. I set out to tell the truth. And sometimes the truth is shocking.
Tennessee Williams
#66. The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.
Vladimir Lenin
#67. Pimping is an art, Whoreson. There are very few pimps in this world who can really take the title of being a pimp. Just because a man gets his money from a whore, that don't make him no true pimp. Real pimps are really rare.
Donald Goines
#68. Nietzsche would have put it, we need art in order not to die from the truth.
Simon Critchley
#69. When my words are concealed
With lies and disguises, truth and beyond
Insecurities in the veil of trust
Betrayal in bounds of lies
It's just the charm of words darling
Giving the illusion of happiness inside misery
Irum Zahra
#70. Whoever thou art that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the Pyramids, and confess thy folly!
Samuel Johnson
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.
Joyce Carol Oates
#74. But then people don't read literature in order to understand; they read it because they want to re-live the feelings and sensations which they found exciting in the past. Art can be a lot of things; but in actual practice, most of it is merely the mental equivalent of alcohol and cantharides.
Aldous Huxley
#75. Man is a being born to believe. And if no church comes forward with its title-deeds of truth to guide him, he will find altars and idols in his own heart and his own imagination.
Benjamin Disraeli
#76. Religions are strange. They seem to be caught in some dream which they won't give up and trying to convince others of the truth of their dream, when in fact each person is having their own dream. Take what you need from the religions and just leave the rest, and be all right with that.
Art Hochberg
#77. The question of truth is forever in the air, and people look for it with particular fervor in art.
Duane Michals
#78. 2 In chapter 3 of The Problem of Pain, Lewis writes, We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.
William Shakespeare
#79. In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.
Siri Hustvedt
#80. The truth echoed in her head. On the same day she met him, he had tried to kill her.
Her mate.
Lisa Carlisle
#81. The most fundamental truth to be told in any art form, as far as Blacks are concerned, is that America is killing us.
Sonia Sanchez
#82. All caught up in the trends, well the truth began to bend.
Jack Johnson
#83. Truth and reality in art do not arise until you no longer understand what you are doing and are capable of but nevertheless sense a power that grows in proportion to your resistance.
Henri Matisse
#84. There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.
Alfred Stieglitz
#85. A lot of country music is sad. I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times. It applies to music. Three chords and the truth - that's what a country song is. There is a lot of heartache in the world.
Willie Nelson
#86. Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
Madeleine L'Engle
#87. I have not attempted to try to relive or recreate the past; but I have sought guidance from those timeless elements in the past which remain valid and vital to the future ... The purpose of my art is to seek beauty and truth, and to explore and glorify the human being and the universe.
Frederick Hart
#88. 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
#89. In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, even though it be covertly, and by snatches.
Herman Melville
#90. In art, truth is a means to an end; in science, it is the only end.
William Whewell
#92. Young actors, fear your admirers! Learn in time, from your first steps, to hear, understand and love the cruel truth about yourselves. Find out who can tell you that truth and talk of your art only with those who can tell you the truth.
Constantin Stanislavski
#93. The notion of "cause and effect" is sometimes useful in real life, and it can even be interesting in art, but I'm more interested in "cause and cause" or "effect and effect" or "and and and".
Kevin Mcpherson Eckhoff
#94. By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which is ugly, and it is only the ugly that is universal.
William Dean Howells
#95. This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. It is beauty, like truth, which brings joy to the heart of man and is that precious fruit which resists the year and tear of time, which unites generations and makes them share things in admiration.
Pope Paul VI
#96. If art, all art, is concerned with truth, then a society in denial will not find much use for it.
Jeanette Winterson
#97. Wish in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up faster.
Noelle Oxenhandler
#98. When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.
John Trudell
#99. If newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.
Virginia Woolf
#100. 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
