Top 100 Quotes About Works Of Art
#1. My mother was a Bloomsbury figure: a great friend of TS Eliot, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell. My grandmother, Mary Hutchinson, gave her life to works of art, being an admirer of Matisse and Giaometti, whom I collected as a young man because of her.
Jacob Rothschild
#2. In some Arab art exhibitions that have happened, there's always this idea that the East is more traditional; they show a lot of works on calligraphy and religion.
Massimiliano Gioni
#5. Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.
James Freeman Clarke
#6. It is not reasonable that art should win the place of honor over our great and powerful mother Nature. We have so overloaded the beauty and richness of her works by our inventions that we have quite smothered her.
Michel De Montaigne
#7. MANY MANAGE TO SEPARATE THEIR LIFE FROM THEIR FILMS. THEY LIVE ONE WAY AND EXPRESS OTHER IDEAS IN THEIR WORKS. THEY ARE ABLE TO SPLIT THEIR CONSCIENCE. I CAN'T. TO ME CINEMA IS NOT JUST MY JOB: IT'S MY LIFE, AND EACH FILM IS AN ACT OF MY LIFE.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#8. Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations.
Rollo May
#9. 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
#10. She works on her never-ending project for hours at a time. In art school they talked about day jobs in tones of horror. She never would have imagined that her day job would be the calmest and least cluttered part of her life.
Emily St. John Mandel
#11. I've had people come up to me with the strangest interpretations of what my lyrics might mean, and I'm like, "You go! I never thought of that, but that works,"...I think that true art is a universal reflection, and true artists are just messengers of that reflection or, at best, skilled presentors.
Serj Tankian
#12. The nature of the beast is, art needs finance. That's how this industry works.
Nathan Fillion
#13. The highest and best work of imagination is the marvelous transformation that it works in character. Imagine that you are one with the principal of good, and you will become truly good.
Charles Fillmore
#14. Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.
Ralph Bakshi
#15. Our existence has always and everywhere been tragic, but man has converted these numberless tragedies into works of art. I know of nothing more astonishing or more wonderful than this transformation.
Maxim Gorky
#17. Recently, the Germans have developed a tendency to prefer the so-called first (youthful) style of great artists to their mature works. Could it be that they do not realize that their aesthetic criteria, generally speaking, are juvenile?
Franz Grillparzer
#18. We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.
Clive Bell
#19. Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.
Eleanor Roosevelt
#20. Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
#21. Every work of art changes its predecessors.
Mason Cooley
#22. The usual criticism of a novel about an artist is that, no matter how real he is as a man, he is not real to us as an artist, since we have to take on trust the works of art he produces.
Randall Jarrell
#23. Works of Art can only be produc'd in Perfection where the Man is either in Affluence or is Above the Care of it.
William Blake
#24. Hence Proust's assertion that the greatness of works of art has nothing to do with the apparent quality of their subject matter, and everything to do with the subsequent treatment of that matter.
Alain De Botton
#26. I love that works of art are printed so that anyone can buy them. The variety of what they put on little postcards astounds me.
Leonard Lauder
#27. If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.
Jasper Fforde
#28. Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish.
Arne Glimcher
#29. You are both a work of art and an artist at work.
Erwin McManus
#30. The starting-point for all systems of aesthetics must be the personal experience of a peculiar emotion. The objects that provoke this emotion we call works of art.
Clive Bell
#31. We find the Works of Nature still more pleasant, the more they resemble those of art.
Joseph Addison
#32. There is no work of art that is without short cuts.
Andre Gide
#33. It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part.
Henry David Thoreau
#35. The greatest works of art speak to us without knowing us.
Alain De Botton
#36. The reader's feedback is the muse for great written works of art.
Sarah Scott
#37. He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman.
He who works with his hands and his head and his heart is an artist.
Francis Of Assisi
#40. All the great things we know have come to us from neurotics. It is they who have founded religions and created great works of art.
Marcel Proust
#41. I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great.
Carl Sagan
#42. An exhibition is in many ways a series of conversations. Between the artist and viewer, curator and viewer, and between the works of art themselves. It clicks when an exhibition feels like it has answered some questions, and raised even more.
Thelma Golden
#43. Your kids might feel more apt to try some art of their own after viewing contemporary works that are far less intimidating than those of the Old Masters.
Lynda Resnick
#44. Anyone who works on a quilt, who devotes her time, energy, creativity, and passion to that art, learns to value the work of her hands. And as any quilter will tell you, a quilter's quilting friends are some of the dearest, most generous, and most supportive people she knows.
Jennifer Chiaverini
#45. How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.
Elizabeth Hardwick
#46. I know thy works, that thou are neither cold nor hot; I would that thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.
Rosa Luxemburg
#47. But all categories of art, idealistic or realistic, surrealistic or constructivist (a new form of idealism) must satisfy a simple test (or they are in no sense works of art): they must persist as objects of contemplation.
Herbert Read
#48. To persons uninstructed in natural history, their country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.
Thomas Huxley
#49. Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight.
John Cusack
#50. The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at.
Siri Hustvedt
#51. There are ... scientific works - star catalogues, for example - which are not art; but the theoretical structures of Gauss, Einstein, or Maxwell are original, individual, "very personal" responses and expressions of exactly the same kind as the creative works of Beethoven or Dostoievski.
James R Newman
#52. Great works of art are only great because they are accessible and comprehensible to everyone.
Leo Tolstoy
#53. It's really interesting with art-movies too, but art especially - to see how your attitude toward artists and works and your level of appreciation of them is always shifting and changing over the years.
Richard Hell
#54. An acquaintance with the great works of art and thought is the only real insurance against the barbarism of the time.
Edmund Wilson
#55. All the art of the past rises up before me, the art of all ages and all civilizations, everything becomes simultaneous, as if space had replaced time. Memories of works of art blend with affective memories, with my work, with my whole life.
Alberto Giacometti
#56. The conventional notions of art have changed, and a lot of things done today are considered works of art that would have been rejected in the past.
David Rockefeller
#57. The works of the great artists are silent books of eternal truths.
Stefan Zweig
#58. It may well be, of course, that America's pop culture is on balance better than our high art. I don't think so, but you can certainly make a case that the best of it aspires to a degree of aesthetic and emotional seriousness that is directly comparable to all but the very greatest works of high art.
Terry Teachout
#59. But Natural Selection, as we shall hereafter see, is a power incessantly ready for action, and is immeasurably superior to man's feeble efforts, as the works of Nature are to those of Art.
Charles Darwin
#60. A puzzle with a solution is a game. A puzzle without a solution is a work of art.
Marty Rubin
#61. Efforts to revive the art principles of the past at best produce works of art that resemble a stillborn child.
Wassily Kandinsky
#62. Artists, by their free expressions, encourage others to be free. This is the quality that makes works of art enduring.
Marty Rubin
#63. Less disappointing than life, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best.
Marcel Proust
#65. I find it a privilege and an honor to be human, for to me, one of the most wondrous and beautiful things in the universe, is found in human form.
Because to be human, is to be able to dream dreams of pyramids and skyscrapers, and majestic works of art that spring from the human mind.
Sara Niles
#67. There is in every artist's studio a scrap heap of discarded works in which the artist's discipline prevailed against his imagination.
Robert Breault
#68. Social Engineering - The art of replacing what works with what sounds good.
Thomas Sowell
#69. Every inch of land there is so contested," I observed, more to myself than to him. "How many lives have been lost fighting over Jerusalem? Yet it is not special in terms of architecture, or location, or works of art.
Margaret George
#70. No greater care is required upon any works than upon such as are to withstand the action of water; for this reason, all parts of the work need to be done exactly according to the rules of the art which all workmen know, but few observe.
Frontinus
#72. I think it was Roger Fry who first coined what he took to be a final definition of a work of art, whether it was a painting, building, poem or Hepplewhite chair. He said that the best works of art are finished products that preserve 'a valuable state of mind'.
Alistair Cooke
#73. We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.
Paulo Coelho
#74. The real issue has nothing to do with whether women wear makeup or don't, gain weight or lose it, have surgery or shun it, dress up or down, make our clothing and faces and bodies into works of art or ignore adornment altogether. The real problem is our lack of choice.
Naomi Wolf
#75. It would be narrowness to suppose that an artist can only care for the impressions of those who know the methods of his art as well as feel its effects. Art works for all whom it can touch.
Gordon S. Haight
#76. The science of design, or of line-drawing, if you like to use this term, is the source and very essence of painting, sculpture, architecture ... Sometimes ... it seems to me that ... all the works of the human brain and hand are either design itself or a branch of that art.
Michelangelo
#77. But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#78. I like the idea of my art being a covetable object; I like preciousness. A lot of art seems to flaunt its throw-away character ... But you have to sail out into the dangerous sea of fine art with these crafted works.
Grayson Perry
#79. Works of Art are meant to connect the human heart to inspiration, for cosmic consciousness to grow in the Supreme Reality rooted in Life and Being.
Nelly Mazloum
#80. A work of art doesn't have to be explained. If you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you. If this doesn't touch you, I have failed.
Louise Bourgeois
#81. I don't know what motivated the artist, which means that the paintings have an intrinsic quality. I think Goethe called it the 'essential dimension,' the thing that makes great works of art great.
Gerhard Richter
#82. Everyone who works with love and with intelligence finds in the very sincerity of his love for nature and art a kind of armor against the opinions of other people.
Vincent Van Gogh
#83. How painting surpasses all human works by reason of the subtle possibilities which it contains.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#84. And when they encounter works of art which show that using new media can lead to new experiences and to new consciousness, and expand our senses, our perception, our intelligence, our sensibility, then they will become interested in this music.
Karlheinz Stockhausen
#85. I want to have a record of your nudity in one of my works of art."
~Larsson TIGER
Pet Torres
#86. 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
#87. Narrative art, the novel, from Murasaki to Proust, has produced great works of poetry.
Eugenio Montale
#88. Years ago I decided that the greatest need in our Country was Art ... We were a very young country and had very few opportunities of seeing beautiful things, works of art ... So, I determined to make it my life's work if I could.
Isabella Stewart Gardner
#89. We're creating multiple personas. We're creating a thespian sense of personality where we see ourselves as works of art, and we see everything in our environment as a prop, as a set, as a stage, as a backdrop for filling ourselves in. We don't see ourselves as ever completed. We are in-formation.
Jeremy Rifkin
#90. Experience was my only teacher; I knew little of the modern art movement. When I first saw the works of the Impressionists, van Gogh, van Dongen, and Fauves, I admired it. But I had to seek the true way alone.
Piet Mondrian
#91. 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
#92. When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.
Billy Joel
#93. most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never trod, and more unutterable than them all are works of art, whose life endures by the side of our own that passes away.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#94. Think about how many great works of art or game-changing ideas were ahead of their time - their creator's talent underappreciated until many years later. That's how we need to treat our young people - because who knows where the next great idea will come from?
Ashley Bryan
#95. Parks are works of art just as a painting or sculpture is.
Thomas Hoving
#97. Should a man live underground, and there converse with the works of art and mechanism, and should afterwards be brought up into the open day, and see the several glories of the heaven and earth, he would immediately pronounce them the work of such a Being as we define God to be.
Aristotle.
#98. You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.
George Bernard Shaw
#99. '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
#100. Life is more important than art - quantity is only important in that the amount of activity is greater not the number of works.
Patrick Swift
