Top 100 Self Art Quotes
#1. Everything in life is drawing, if you want. Drawing is quintessential to knowing the self. Art that survives from one generation to the next is the art that actually carries something that tells society about self.
Richard Tuttle
#2. Our job, as souls on this mortal journey, is to shift the seat of our identity from the lower realm to the upper, from the ego to the Self. Art
Steven Pressfield
#3. Vulnerability gives us freedom, power and connects us to a network of injured souls. It is through the art of being real that we can heal ourself and others.
Shannon L. Alder
#5. The art of conversation, or the qualification for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with a respect for the emergencies of the moment.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#6. How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.
Yann Martel
#7. Our Nation has a diverse and extremely rich cultural heritage. It is a source of pride and strength to millions of Americans who look to the arts for inspiration, communication and the opportunity for creative self-expression.
Gerald R. Ford
#8. Documentary is thought to be art when it transcends its reference to the world, when the work can be regarded, first and foremost, as an act of self-expression on the part of the artist.
Allan Sekula
#9. To stay true to ourselves and remain kind to others is an art. It does require daily vigilance and, at the same time, it's important to remember that art can often get messy.
Christopher Dines
#10. 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
#11. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.
Christopher McDougall
#12. The picture is a self-sufficient work of art. It is not connected to anything outside.
Kurt Schwitters
#13. 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
#15. 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
#16. Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.
Brenda Ueland
#17. Working on art, as opposed to being in a constant collaborative state, as in a band, is something that I've always done - to a smaller degree, but it always remained a part of my integral self.
Kim Gordon
#18. Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.
Antoine Thomson D'Abbadie
#19. The Art of War is self-explanatory
Sun Tzu
#20. I really do think that art can save you in some sense. It's the last meaning, unless you're religious-and I'm not religious. It's the only secular vehicle for transcendence we have. It's an immediate self-validating experience. It lifts you beyond your mortal clay.
Sam Savage
#21. Art is an affirmation of life, a rebuttal of death. And here we blunder into paradox again, for during the creation of any form of art, art which affirms the value and the holiness of life, the artist must die. To serve a work of art, great or small, is to die, to die to self.
Madeleine L'Engle
#22. To thrive, all businesses must focus on the art of self-disruption. Rather than wait for the competition to steal your business, every founder and employee needs to be willing to cannibalize their existing revenue streams in order to create new ones. All disruption starts with introspection.
Jay Samit
#23. When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence.
Ansel Adams
#24. An artist has got to get acquainted with himself just as much as he can. It is no easy job, for it is not a present-day habit of humanity.
Chaim Potok
#25. I was an artist, but not a self-proclaimed great artist, just a common man who was working in a form of art which is universal.
Jack Kirby
#26. Too often, complaint is not about principled objection on moral grounds, but opportunistic objection on grounds of self-interest. To rectify this, we need to work on mastering the art of complaint.
Julian Baggini
#27. All we are doing are self-portraits. As simple that. We accumulate knowledge and wisdom and power, and we get our hearts broken, and we write. We write for others to absorb what took us so long to understand.
Cristian Mihai
#28. The child will leave the nest. The best paint job will crack. The best play will become boring. The best work will grow tedious. The best art will lose meaning. The greatest creation will decay. Behind all this, lies my true self.
Vironika Tugaleva
#29. From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.
Michel Foucault
#30. Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be cultivated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be developed.
Karen Armstrong
#31. He showed videotape of himself committing acts of self-violence and informing news crews that he had been assaulted by a marauding mob of irate art historians.
Johnny Rich
#32. I believe in art, and more fundamentally the freedom to express one's self creatively. People don't know yet what they'll ultimately believe in or how they'll organize their lives. They're kind of in limbo.
K.M. Soehnlein
#33. There's so many bigger things in the world. The art world is such a tiny little thing compared to wars and migration crises. It's weird to be self-absorbed in it.
Jim Shaw
#34. The scientific spirit, the contempt of tradition, the lack of discipline and the exaltation of the individual have very nearly made an end of art. It can only be restored by the love of beauty, the reverence for tradition, the submission to discipline and the rigor of self-control.
Kenyon Cox
#35. I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.
Madonna
#36. Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.
Charles Saatchi
#37. We are beings emanating energy of multiple colors and sounds of Light.
Jacqueline Ripstein
#38. There's magic and metaphors in music superior to any other art form. An exquisite alchemy is involved in mixing pieces of your self and soul into the precisely perfect blend of harmonies, melodies, and lyrics that strike a chord.
A.J. Compton
#39. The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.
Honore De Balzac
#40. The time is probably not far distant when music will stand revealed perchance as the mightiest of the arts, and certainly as the one art peculiarly representative of our modern world, with its intense life, complex civilization, and feverish self-consciousness.
Hugh Reginald Haweis
#41. A kata is not fixed or immoveable. Like water, it's ever changing and fits itself to the shape of the vessel containing it. However, kata are not some kind of beautiful competitive dance, but a grand martial art of self-defense - which determines life and death.
Kenwa Mabuni
#42. Disappointment over love affairs generally has the effect of driving men to drink, and women to ruin; and this, because most people never learn the art of transmuting their strongest emotions into dreams of a constructive nature.
Napoleon Hill
#43. The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites,
Eli Siegel
#44. 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
#45. One is either an artist or one is not. It is not something one becomes. It is something that one is from birth. We do not study to be artists. We study to become more proficient. To understand more.
Edward Swift
#46. All along we find that social life - religion, politics, art - reflects the stages reached in the development of the knowledge of self; it shows the social uses made of this knowledge.
James Mark Baldwin
#47. Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or "highway of despair," in Baillie's fine and florid rendering, like Jesus' route to Golgotha).
Kenny Smith
#48. For me art and chess are closely related, both are forms in which the self finds beauty and expression.
Vladimir Kramnik
#49. Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.
Bill Viola
#50. 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
#51. They self-inflict punishment on their own broken lives, put their faith in their possessions, in their jobs, or their wives.
Bob Dylan
#52. What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere - it is an art form in itself.
Anita Brookner
#53. Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.
Anais Nin
#54. Self-expression is not enough; experiment is not enough; the recording of special moments or cases is not enough. All of the artshave broken faith or lost connection with their origin and function. They have ceased to be concerned with the legitimate and permanent material of art.
Jane Heap
#55. Bodybuilding is an art, your body is the canvas, weights are your brush and nutrition is your paint. We all have the ability to turn a self portrait into a masterpiece.
Kai Greene
#56. It is the business of a general to be serene and inscrutable, impartial and self-controlled.
Sun Tzu
#57. The liberal arts inform and enlighten the independent citizen of a democracy in the use of his own resources ... They enlarge his capacity for self-knowledge and expand his opportunities for self-improvement ... They are the wellsprings of a free society.
Alfred Whitney Griswold
#58. Art is the distortion of an unendurable reality ... Art is correction, modification of a situation; art is communication, connection ... Art is social, self-sufficient, and total.
Jean Tinguely
#59. Self-defence, self-confidence, discipline and self control. The values you learn are priceless.
Rickson Gracie
#60. If you can change the way you think in time you will notice a change in your heart and also a change in your life and the way you see things.
The Prolific Penman
#61. The fragile art of existenceIs kept alive by sheer persistenceThe fragile art of existence.No time for self-pityNo time for dwelling on what should have beenBut is yet to be.
Chuck Schuldiner
#63. When something comes from within, when it is a part of you, you have no choice but to live it, to express it.
Kamal Ravikant
#64. Don't ask me what it means; ask me how it felt.
Jill Telford
#65. 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
#66. When the artist finds himself he is lost. The fact that he has succeeded in never finding himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only lasting achievement.
Max Ernst
#67. Of course it's almost ludicrously difficult to talk about art. And about beauty. Beauty is a perversion--how can you retain your self-respect when you talk about it?
Torgny Lindgren
#68. For me, art really starts with acceptance, self trust. Wherever you come to with art, it's perfect. You don't have to come with anything. What you bring to something is the art. That's where it's found. It's found within you.
Jeff Koons
#69. Kids are naturally gifted at art from a very young age. The problem is when they get older and become self-conscious. The process should always be fun, though.
Damien Hirst
#70. A clever general ... avoids an army when its spirit is keen, but attacks it when it is sluggish and inclined to return. This is the art of studying moods. Disciplined and calm, he awaits the appearance of disorder and hubbub among the enemy. This is the art of retaining self-possession.
Sun Tzu
#71. The one great art is that of making a complete human being of oneself.
G.I. Gurdjieff
#72. If I could ever be on a Missy Elliott record, I could then die. Missy Elliott, Mary J. Blige - I love hearing them interviewed, I love the way they talk about their art. They're very self-assured, they're funny, they're inviting. I love it.
Neko Case
#73. As comestibles nourish our bodies and ideas nourish our minds, so art nourishes our souls.
Alexandra York
#74. Art gives those unexpressed parts of ourselves permission to be felt and spoken.
Jaeda DeWalt
#75. Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.
William Shakespeare
#76. If ever in pain, I think the best thing we can do is to create something.
Kamal Ravikant
#77. My unassisted heart is barren clay, That of its native self can nothing feed: Of good and pious works Thou art the seed, That quickens only where Thou sayest it may: Unless Thou show to us Thine own true way No man can find it: Father! Thou must lead. These words will repay
A.W. Tozer
#78. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
T. S. Eliot
#79. James Thurber was an inspiration because his drawings were so primitive. I am self-taught - I didn't go to art school - so I thought when I started doing them, 'If James Thurber can be a cartoonist, I can,' because his stuff is very raw.
Bruce Eric Kaplan
#81. Certainly, I devote my energy to both telling my personal life story and seeking self- obliteration. However, I will not destroy myself through art.
Yayoi Kusama
#83. To suffer is better than to do evil;' and the art of rhetoric is described as only useful for the purpose of self-accusation.
Plato
#84. It is a doctrine of war not to assume the enemy will not come, but rather to rely on one's readiness to meet him; not to presume that he will not attack, but rather to make one's self invincible.
Sun Tzu
#85. Tat tvam asi: "Thou art That." Atman is Brahman: the Self in each person is not different from the Godhead.
Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
#86. Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.
Charles Stross
#88. You dive deeper, you strip away the cleverness and the words become more important than your ego and that's when you know it's real, when it's good.
Kamal Ravikant
#89. All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfacti on but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.
Dorothy Thompson
#91. Painting is a means of self-enlightenment.
John Olsen
#92. We each are artists of the self, creating a collage -- a new and original work of art -- out of scraps and fragments of identifications. The people with whom we identify are, positively or negatively, always important to us. Our feelings toward them are, in some way, always intense.
Judith Viorst
#93. I love the discipline. I love the schedule of pushing your body to an extreme and getting it to a particular type of physical shape. Learning a new self defense or some kind of martial art that I didn't know before and the loving of that is also hating that at the same time.
Jessica Biel
#94. You know what you are actually in love with? Integrity. The impossible. The clean, consistent, reasonable, self-faithful, the all-of-one-style, like a work of art.
Ayn Rand
#95. One can have no smaller or greater mastery than mastery of oneself.
Leonardo Da Vinci
#96. Unlike art, the consumption of fashion is not based primarily on knowledge or education but functions through visual awareness, a type of sensuality and perception of the corporeal self.
Valerie Steele
#97. The best martial artist doesn't win fights, but avoids fights. Martial arts is a way of gaining basic self-mastery of your mind, body and emotions. It can also be very useful in combat situations.
Frederick Lenz
#98. Art is not documentary. It may incidentally serve that function in its own way but its true effort is to open to us dimensions of the spirit of the self that normally lie smothered under the weight of living.
Jeanette Winterson
#99. If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.
Edward Hopper
#100. Art is self expression. If you are expressing someone else's personality, that is not art.
Bennie Wallace
