Top 100 Quotes About Works Of Art
#1. I wanted to be a painter and an artist. And it's interesting that in some of my later musical works, I refer so often and associate myself with works of art.
Gunther Schuller
#2. In India, nobody really talks about works of art; they always talk about the appreciation of art. You buy this for 3,000 rupees, it'll become 30,000 in two months.
A. Balasubramaniam
#3. Works of art are landscapes of the mind.
Ted Godwin
#4. The destiny of photography has taken it far beyond the role to which it was originally thought to be limited: to give more accurate reports on reality (including works of art). Photography is the reality; the real object is often experienced as a letdown.
Susan Sontag
#5. Things are not as easy to understand and say as we might prefer to believe; most events are inexpressible, happening in a space where no word has ever set foot, and most inexpressible of all are works of art, mysterious existences, whose life continues as ours passes away.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#6. Some of life's moments mark a break in consciousness; others give rise to streams of scintillating, philosophical ideas or astonishing works of art; still others, to important meeting or profound personal upheavals.
Elie Wiesel
#7. Words are like shards of glass. By themselves they're worthless; however, when placed together in just the right way, they can become great works of art.
Leigh M. Lane
#8. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.
Beatrice Wood
#9. Man has used human rhythmic movement as raw material out of which to create works of art, as the composer of music uses sound, the sculptor uses stone and wood, the painter his pigments, and the writer - words.
Ted Shawn
#10. The '80s market was only a Japanese market. It was the Japanese outbidding each other for the most expensive works of art. When the Japanese economy went down the tubes, there was no one left to pay the prices that have been recorded for all of those works.
Arne Glimcher
#11. Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.
Nick Harkaway
#12. I'm interested in the limits of personality, in the possibility of change, and the saving power of art. Do powerful works of art raise our consciousness to such a degree that we refrain from sliding into moral hazard? Do we take note? Or are we doomed to repetition?
Adam Ross
#13. Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?
Virginia Woolf
#14. There's this shop in New York I go to; it has bones and fossils and insects that are like works of art. I have a few on my wall.
Eva Green
#15. We at BMW do not build cars as consumer objects, just to drive from A to B. We build mobile works of art.
Chris Bangle
#16. I think about all the people who have created something that lives after them - works of art, plays, music, films, literature, poetry that will be read, seen, performed, and heard for the rest of time. If I could do something that lives after me, then I think I will have had a life well led.
Seamus Dever
#17. Some of the most unhappy artists in the most difficult situations can create awe-inspiring works of art.
Eric Gibbons
#18. I think they're bogus, honestly. How utter garbage like Crash and Million Dollar Baby can win best picture, where true works of art such as Garden State go untouched is beyond me. It just proves how close-minded America really is, and I refuse to take part in it.
Zach Braff
#20. All of us alive today are or can be its prey, most of all the person who believes he is creating works of art when he is in fact creating mere kitsch objects.
Gillo Dorfles
#21. Most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, areeffectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity.
Raymond Williams
#22. Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in daily fidelity.
Albert Camus
#23. I'm very much against photographs being framed and treated with reverence and signed and sold as works of art. They aren't. They should be seen in a magazine or a book and then be used to wrap up the fish and chucked away.
Antony Armstrong-Jones
#25. Translated books rarely get reviewed in the press. Books or poems or works of art that don't seem to have a corresponding style or figure or theme, obviously they're hard to digest.
Elliott Colla
#26. Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of artists.
Joyce Carol Oates
#27. The water caught the Falselight glimmer like layers of shifting, translucent mirrors and formed split-second works of art in the air, but men cursed it anyway, because it made their heads wet.
Scott Lynch
#28. A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence.
Robert Smithson
#29. I believe that photography can create great works of art, but hitherto it has been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. (1908)
Auguste Rodin
#30. Language evolves and moves on. It is an organic thing. It is not stuck in an ivory tower, hung with expensive works of art and overlooking most of Seattle with a helipad stuck on its roof.
E.L. James
#31. I feel genius in great works of art. I have seen medical cures that science can't explain, some seemingly triggered by faith. The same is true of millions of other people.
Deepak Chopra
#32. Like adverts, today's works of art aim to create a brand, even if they have no product to sell except themselves.
Roger Scruton
#33. I want to serve chess through games, books that are works of art. I would like to bring the game closer to many people all over the world.
Garry Kasparov
#34. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. They teach us to abide by our own spontaneous expression with good humored inflexibility whether the whole cry of voices is on the other side.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#35. In my opinion, works of art should be viewed as gifts; something precious given from a point of empathy, where personal enrichment is vastly superior to the value of the gift, and the giver begs for nothing but for the gift to shine on its own.
Kevin Focke
#36. Works of art should be stimulating. They should wake people up rather than acting like a sedative.
Tod Machover
#37. Beauty is not the purpose of creation, it is its reward. Its appearance, often late in the day, is no more than an indication that the disrupted equilibrium between man and nature has once again been restored by art. Submitted to this test, what remains of contemporary works of art?
Brassai
#38. I feel that when I am painting, it is a form of worship. I see how wonderful nature is and how wonderful art is ... and by trying to produce these works of art, I feel that I am just showing my appreciation of these creations.
E. J. Hughes
#40. Although photography generates works that can be called art-it requires subjectivity, it can lie, it gives aesthetic pleasure-photography is not, to begin with, an art form at all. Like language, it is a medium in which works of art (among other things) are made.
Susan Sontag
#41. Universal appreciation of art ... belongs to those countries and those ages which are not, or were not, ruled by materialism. Though travel was never so easy, literature on art never so profuse, and works of art never so widely distributed, a real passion for pictures is encountered but rarely.
Walter J. Phillips
#42. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.
Marcel Proust
#43. Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.
Claude Debussy
#44. Humanity looks to works of art to shed light upon its path and its destiny.
Pope John Paul II
#45. Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#46. Artistic form is congruent with the dynamic forms of our direct sensuous, mental, and emotional life; works of art are projections of "felt life", as Henry James called it, into spatial, temporal, and poetic structures.
Susanne Katherina Langer
#47. Shouldn't it give us pause that the oldest works of art are as impressive today in their beauty and spontaneity as they were many thousands of years ago?
Kazimir Malevich
#48. 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
#49. Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself.
Edward Hirsch
#50. The principle for us is that works of art shouldn't be considered liquid assets to be converted into cash,
Anonymous
#51. It is rather frightening to be able to write so revoltingly, yet so successfully. All these letters are works of art, except, perhaps, the last. They are positively oily.
Stella Gibbons
#52. The truth is that works of art test the spectator much more than the spectator tests them.
Lawren Harris
#53. If our houses, or clothes, our household furniture and utensils are not works of art, they are either wretched makeshifts, or, what is worse, degrading shams of better things.
William Morris
#54. Wonder at the first sight of works of art may be the effect of ignorance and novelty; but real admiration and permanent delight in them are the growth of taste and knowledge.
William Hazlitt
#55. What someone calls my books is irrelevant to me. I consider them works of art and rules and categories and labels mean nothing.
James Frey
#56. Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.
Jerry Saltz
#57. If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living.
Katherine Paterson
#58. I consider drawings finished works of art, first of all. However, the ideas can be something that can be developed into something larger. I don't make so many drawings anymore since I'm working with language. I used to make more when I worked with sculptural things, especially the wire pieces.
Robert Barry
#59. Those works whose ideal has not as much living reality and, as it were, personality as the beloved one or a friend had better remain unwritten. They would at least never become works of art.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
#60. All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.
Robert Henri
#61. When I create works of art, I do it because it is part of me and I must create. But afterward, when the work is done, I hope that it'll speak to people, that it'll open up their hearts or their minds. That cannot happen if the art is buried for safekeeping.
Nalini Singh
#62. Those wildly scary stories you tell yourself that give you anxiety attacks come from the same source (your imagination) that helps you create wildly imaginative works of art.
Carrie Bloomston
#63. Photography has the capacity to provide images of man and his environment that are both works of art and moments in history.
Cornell Capa
#64. Like surgeons trying to save a life, the conservators and preservers at New York City museums dedicate themselves to ensuring the longevity of works of art for public view.
Simon Van Booy
#65. Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.
W. H. Auden
#66. Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth. All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times.
Franz Marc
#67. Certainly, the history of my life and the works of art which have especially enriched it is precisely that: the depiction or incantation of a handful of metaphors whose spendour rests upon their intonation.
Michael Ayrton
#68. For when it is in the hope of making a priceless discovery that we desire to receive certain impressions from nature or from works of art, we have qualms lest our soul imbibe inferior impressions which might lead us to form a false estimate of the value of Beauty.
Marcel Proust
#69. Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.
Man Ray
#70. All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.
Clive Bell
#71. These days any self-respecting exhibition of nude photos has to have pornographically explicit images to prove that they are works of art.
Geoff Dyer
#72. Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music [ ... ], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?
Elizabeth Bishop
#73. We have built for this world a family mansion, and the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.
Henry David Thoreau
#74. I hate when art becomes a religion. I feel the opposite. When you start putting a higher value on works of art than people, you're forfeiting your humanity.
Woody Allen
#75. Appreciation of works of art requires organized effort and systematic study. Art appreciation can no more be absorbed by aimless wandering in galleries than can surgery be learned by casual visits to a hospital.
Albert C. Barnes
#76. True works of art contain their own theory and give us the measurement according to which we should judge them.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
#77. Flattery has a short battery life, but reminding people they are amazing and precious and wanted and works of art can truly change their lives.
Donald Miller
#78. Just as there is no substitute for original works of art, there is no substitute for the world of direct sensual experience.
Paul Mellon
#79. For it is a plain fact that, most certainly in the West, the writings, works of art, musical compositions which are of central reference, comport that which is "grave and constant" (Joyce's epithets) in the mystery of our condition.
George Steiner
#80. Many great works of art, poetry, and music are inspired by astral memories. The desire to do noble, beautiful things here on Earth is also often a carryover of astral experiences between a person's earth lives.
Paramahansa Yogananda
#81. From the beginning of church history, music, writing, literature, and the greatest works of art all came from the church. To change the culture and make it a force for good, you have to be in it and be a part of it.
Patricia Heaton
#82. Seizing new ground, making connections between people or ideas, working without a map - these are works of art, and if you do them, you are an artist, regardless of whether you wear a smock, use a computer, or work with others all day long.
Seth Godin
#83. The finest works of art are those in which there is the least matter. The closer expression comes to thought, the more the word clings to the idea and disappears, the more beautiful the work of art.
Gustave Flaubert
#84. I do not deny that I have made drawings and watercolors of an erotic nature. But they are always works of art. Are there no artists who have done erotic pictures?
Egon Schiele
#85. Works of art are infinitely solitary and nothing is less likely to reach them than criticism. Only love can grasp them and hold them and do them justice.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#87. Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.
Simone Weil
#88. Works of art are born of those who confront danger, who go to the limit of an experience, to a point beyond which no human can go. The farther one ventures, the more distinctive, the more personal, the more unique life becomes.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#89. Take the beautifully wild pieces of your life and shape them into the manicured works of art you want your life to become. That is your lifescape
Jaha Knight
#90. your eyes could inspire men to go to war, to paint works of art, to rip their goddamn heart out of their chest and offer it to you without a second thought .
Jay Crownover
#91. If only we could persuade galleries to observe a fallow period in which, for two months every other year, new and old works of art could be sold in back rooms and all main galleries would be devoted to revisiting shows gone by.
Jerry Saltz
#92. Someday it will dawn on man that woman does not read the wonderful books with which he has filled his libraries, and though she may well admire his marvelous works of art in museums she herself will rarely create, only copy.
Esther Vilar
#93. I believe in the time when we shall be able to create works of art in the Theatre without the use of the written play, without the use of actors.
Edward Gordon Craig
#94. I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
Adrienne Rich
#95. Whatever the practical origins of aesthetic discernment may have been, it has been used to create great works of art. When the very loftiest human creations are seen to derive from humble origins and functions, what needs revision is not our esteem for these creations but our notion of nobility.
Robert Nozick
#96. They are works of art that can be considered works of art but don't have to be in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum.
Michael Heizer
#97. If history were a photograph of the past it would be flat and uninspiring. Happily, it is a painting; and, like all works of art, it fails of the highest truth unless imagination and ideas are mixed with the paints.
Allan Nevins
#98. Screenplays are not works of art. They are invitations to others to collaborate on a work of art.
Paul Schrader
#99. We call those works of art concrete that came into being on the basis of their inherent resources and rules - without external borrowing from natural phenomena, without transforming those phenomena, in other words: not by abstraction.
Max Bill
#100. I've never really felt like a journalist. I've felt like a writer and a diarist. I have made myself vulnerable in my writing, and I think that vulnerability makes people strong. My favorite performances or works of art are always people showing that side of themselves.
Tavi Gevinson
