Top 100 True Art Quotes
#1. Gratitude for the gift of life is the primary wellspring of all religions, the hallmark of the mystic, the source of all true art ... It is a privilege to be alive in this time when we can choose to take part in the self-healing of our world.
Joanna Macy
#2. 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
#3. The manifestation of poetry in external life is formal perfection. True sentiment grows within, and art must represent internal phenomena externally.
Franz Grillparzer
#4. Where there has been true science, art has always been its exponent.
Leo Tolstoy
#5. Most true artists care about music as a pure, passionate art form, but can get caught in the trap of the business. Which, sadly, has now become more important than the artist or even the music itself.
Rosanna Arquette
#6. The world is a king, and like a king, desires flattery in return for favor; but true art is selfish and perverse - it will not submit to the mold of flattery.
Ludwig Van Beethoven
#7. Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art more and more. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her. If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere.
Vincent Van Gogh
#8. True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
Albert Einstein
#9. Never judge a work of art by its defects.
They same is true with people.
Jose N. Harris
#10. 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
#11. A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent
Oscar Wilde
#12. The effort to create a work of art that is true and potentially lasting, that is the very best work of art you can create at that point in your life - a book that may only reach or move a few people but will seem to those people somehow transformative. That's the ideal; that's always the motivation.
Claire Messud
#13. In The Tricky Art of Co-Existing, Sandi Toksvig navigates life's little dilemmas with wit and not-so-common sense. You'll learn the strange history of common courtesy and the one true secret of social success: how to not drive everyone around you crazy.
William Poundstone
#15. 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
#16. True art is but the anti-type of nature; the embodiment of discovered beauty in utility.
James A. Garfield
#17. If my fellow Americans could adopt even a fraction of the French attitude about food and life (don't worry, you don't have to sign on to the politics, too), managing weight would cease to be a terror, an obsession, and reveal its true nature as part of the art of living.
Mireille Guiliano
#18. Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.
Edmund Clarence Stedman
#19. A true work of art can stand many seeings, revealing anew at each seeing.
John Marin
#20. 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
#21. I will be patient, kind, faithful and true
To a man who loves music a man who loves art
Respect's the spirit world and thinks with his heart
India.Arie
#22. Grief! thou art classed amongst the depressing passions. And true it is that thou humblest to the dust, but also thou exaltest to the clouds. Thou shakest us with ague, but also thou steadiest like frost. Thou sickenest the heart, but also thou healest its infirmities.
Thomas De Quincey
#23. To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.
Vladimir Nabokov
#24. The key to using abstraction effectively in programming is finding a notion of relevance that is appropriate for both the builder of an abstraction and the potential clients of the abstraction. That is the true art of programming.
John V. Guttag
#25. True Music, like all true Art, is an experience to be shared, not judged, for praise cannot make it better, as blame cannot make it worse
Pat Martino
#26. Film is an incredible way to express yourself and your vision, as is fashion, but you have to make sure [to] be confident and honest and true to yourself and say something that means something, because that is really the point of any art.
Tom Ford
#27. Why, an' thou shouldst live a thousand years thou'dst never hear so masterful a cursing. Alack, her art died with her. There be base and weakling imitations left, but no true blasphemy.
Mark Twain
#28. Tiger Woods is like a piece of fine art that belongs in the Louvre, and so, too, is Scott Medlock's painting of Tiger Woods and Sergio Garcia ... a true masterpiece!
Al Michaels
#29. Beautiful buildings are more than scientific. They are true organisms, spiritually conceived; works of art, using the best technology by inspiration rather than the idiosyncrasies of mere taste or any averaging by the committee mind.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#30. 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
#31. It's true that things are beautiful when they work. Art is function.
Giannina Braschi
#32. Painters and poets are obliged to exaggerate the proportions of their figures in order to give true perspective.
Mahatma Gandhi
#33. Surely only boring people went in for conversations consisting of questions and answers. The art of true conversation consisted in the play of minds.
Ved Mehta
#34. The science which teacheth arts and handicrafts is merely science for the gaining of a living; but the science which teacheth deliverance from worldly existence, is not that the true science?
Thomas Hobbes
#35. True alchemy lies in this formula: 'Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse'.
Arthur Rimbaud
#36. The true artist is quite rational as well as imaginative and knows what he is doing; if he does not, his art suffers.
Isaac Asimov
#37. There's a point at which when I start to know a man well
this isn't true of women
I wonder whether there's something in him that's evil. Something that's pure and can't be touched. This quality of evil may be related to the quality of artistry, for an artist has the same characteristics.
Kathy Acker
#38. Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can not be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.
Ezra Pound
#39. True writing is not an art or science but it's an anthem to preach own soul
Kunal Jajal
#40. Safety and security indeed stifles creativity! The more I suffer the better I create. Yet again I create to live of it safe and secure one day, if not everyday...
Nathan Haddish Mogos
#41. True art was more than beauty; it was more than technique. It was not just imitation.
Brandon Sanderson
#42. The worse you're performing, the more you must work mentally and emotionally. The greatest and toughest art in golf is "playing badly well." All the true greats have been masters at it.
Jack Nicklaus
#43. If you can't focus then how do you expect to make your dreams come true?
The Prolific Penman
#44. You can't really appreciate a work of art until you can understand how difficult it was to create. And that's probably true of any work of art - a rock, a tree, a bird, a fish, a sunrise made of light and air.
Laurence Overmire
#45. Beauty is itself so unattainable that it escapes altogether; and the true artist, like the true Mystic, can never rest
Aleister Crowley
#46. It was Richepin who said somewhere, 'The love of art means loss of real love' ... True, but on the other hand, real love makes you disgusted with art.
Vincent Van Gogh
#47. Food - like art, like music - brings people together, it's true. It begins, though, with a private experience, a single person stirred, moved, and wanting company in that altered stated. So we say, "You have to taste this." We say, "Please, take a bite.
Jessica Fechtor
#48. True perfection seems imperfect,
yet it is perfectly itself.
True fullness seems empty,
yet it is fully present.
True straightness seems crooked.
True wisdom seems foolish.
True art seems artless.
Lao-Tzu
#49. True art is thoughtful, emotional examination of how human themes impact the overall experience of existing. The rest is kitsch.
Tiffany Madison
#50. How is it that in the so-called barbarian ages art was understood, whereas in our age of progress exactly the opposite is true?
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
#51. Music is a permanent art, it will always go through phases where you like it and are in tune with it, but saying that music "got bad" is infantile. The same is true with your life.
John Darnielle
#52. We love the imperfect shapes in nature and in the works of art, look for an intentional error as a sign of the golden key and sincerity found in true mastery.
Dejan Stojanovic
#53. A great photograph is a full expression of what one feels about what is being photographed in the deepest sense and is thereby a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety.
Ansel Adams
#54. The great quality of true art is that it rediscovers, grasps and reveals to us that reality far from where we live, from which we get farther and farther away as the conventional knowledge we substitute for it becomes thicker and more impermeable.
Marcel Proust
#55. He found himself weeping.
Not for the future or for the emperor. These were the tears of a man who saw before himself a masterpiece. True art was more than beauty; it was more than technique. It was not just imitation.
It was boldness, it was contrast, it was subtlety.
Brandon Sanderson
#56. Kurosawa was one of film's true greats ... His ability to transform a vision into a powerful work of art is unparalleled. So it seemed appropriate to name the new digital studio for him.
George Lucas
#57. The nature of a true seeker after beauty is to overlook flaws.
Ron Brackin
#58. Abstract art is not the creation of another reality but the true vision of reality.
Piet Mondrian
#59. No refining of one's taste in matters of art or literature, no sharpening of one's powers of insight in matters of science or psychology, can ever take the place of one's sensitiveness to the life of the earth. This is the beginning and the end of a person's true education.
John Cowper Powys
#60. Nothing, it is true, is more common than for both Science and Art to pay homage to the spirit of the age, and for creative taste to accept the law of critical taste.
Friedrich Schiller
#61. Often we had no choice: we couldn't reform the whole world. And didn't somebody once say 'Politics is the art of the possible'?" "Quite true - which is why only second-rate minds go into it. Genius likes to challenge the impossible.
Arthur C. Clarke
#62. It's true that what is morbid is highly valued today, and so you may think that I am only joking or that I've devised just one more means of praising Art with the help of irony.
Czeslaw Milosz
#63. A proof of really great art is that it is generally true - it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.
Lafcadio Hearn
#64. 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
#65. True politics cannot take a single step without first paying homage to morals, and while politics itself is a difficult art, its combination with morals is no art at all; for morals cuts the Gordian knot which politics cannot solve as soon as the two are in conflict.
Immanuel Kant
#66. It is unquestionably true that the need for art is not created by economic conditions. But neither is the need for food created by economics. On the contrary, the need for food and warmth creates economics.
Leon Trotsky
#67. I think masturbating is a really important function in art. People don't like to hear that kind of stuff, but it's true.
Patti Smith
#68. A true Grandmaster is a person who starts the arts at a very young age and continues it until their body will no longer allows it. Then they still contribute mentally to the art.
Choi Hong Hi
#69. The true cost of following your dreams isn't what you sacrifice when you chase them, it's what you lose when you don't
Simon S. Tam
#70. To my father, art had no restrictions. He was a true 'American Primitive.' He greatly enjoyed sketching and photography, carrying a camera with him whenever he could,
John Carter Cash
#71. Our art is a way of being dazzled by truth: the light on the grotesquely grimacing retreating face is true, and nothing else.
Franz Kafka
#72. When religion becomes artificial, art has a duty to rescue it. Art can show that the symbols which religions would have us believe literally true are actually figurative. Art can idealize those symbols, and so reveal the profound truths they contain.
Richard Wagner
#73. As my uncle always says, 'If your vibe outweighs your substance, you're destined to be a novelty.' I think that is true in all art.
Mat Kearney
#74. There are now college degrees in game design and interactive media, so if I were starting now, I would probably do that. When I started, you had to break into design from QA or programming or art, but it's really not true anymore.
Jane Jensen
#75. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.
Vincent Van Gogh
#76. I have now attained the true art of letter-writing, which we are always told, is to express on paper exactly what one would say to the same person by word of mouth.
Jane Austen
#77. True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
Alexander Pope
#78. Telling ourselves that fiction is in a sense true and at the same time not true is essential to the art of fiction. It's been at the heart of fiction from the start. Fiction offers both truth, and we know it's a flat-out lie. Sometimes it drives a novelist mad. Sometimes it energizes us.
Joanna Scott
#79. A film that is a true work of art transcends theatre and heartwarmingly changes lives.
A.D. Posey
#80. It appears that nature has hid at the bottom of our hearts talents and abilities unknown to us. It is only the passions that have the power of bringing them to light, and sometimes give us views more true and more perfect than art could possibly do.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#81. This is a new phase in history where art, science, business and spirit will join together in the pursuit of true wealth.
James Altucher
#82. And how that lady Suz was all wrong: art is not all about chaos, about taking things apart. True art, Emma will tell them, is about finding a way to make what's broken whole.
Jennifer McMahon
#83. This is what Great Art does. It becomes more real than the real, more true than the truth.
Cormac McCarthy
#84. There is no true understanding of any art without some knowledge of its philosophy. Only then does its meaning come clear.
Frank Lloyd Wright
#85. Degas is one of the very few painters who have given the floor its true importance.
Paul Valery
#86. Amongst many qualities of a true leader, he is a successful manager who has mastered the art of people management.
Rehan Waris
#87. While art thrives on the blazing colours of scandal, literature blossoms on the dark soil of tragedy.
E.A. Bucchianeri
#88. But he did not believe ordinary citizens created art. True art was anomalous; it was a rare mutation. It didn't happen simply because one willed it so. He thought it an utter and exasperating waste of an ordinary man's time.
Lily King
#89. While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality ... true art lies in a reality that is felt.
Odilon Redon
#91. The true function of art is to criticize, embellish and edit nature ... the artist is a sort of impassioned proof-reader, blue penciling the bad spelling of God.
H.L. Mencken
#92. The genuine artist is never 'true to life.' He sees what is real, but not as we are normally aware of it. We do not go storming through life like actors in a play. Art is never real life.
Wallace Stevens
#93. I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I'd love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.
Luigi Pirandello
#94. The sham engineers of the music industry, who steer the wheels of public opinion, are driving the good features of calypso into the ground. I shudder to think what these greedy men will eventually do to this true art form.
Harry Belafonte
#95. In art, and in the higher ranges of science, there is a feeling of harmony which underlies all endeavor. There is no true greatness in art or science without that sense of harmony.
Albert Einstein
#97. ...but nature scants that lights in all it makes, working in much the manner of a painter who knows the true art, but those whose brush hand shakes.
Dante Alighieri
#99. The true end of Art is not to imitate a fixed material condition, but to represent a living motion,
George Inness
#100. The thing is', (Rufus) Stone said, 'that if you don't believe that you are an old man, or a woman, or a tramp, then how can you expect anyone else to believe you? Looking the part is just the surface; being the part is the true disguise.
Andy Lane
