Top 100 Understand Art Quotes
#1. Very few people ever understand art. If you are lucky, they will buy it for the wrong reasons.
Walter Darby Bannard
#2. 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
#3. It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art ... Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes ...
Mark Twain
#4. Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.
Vincent Van Gogh
#5. Truants like you should understand art. The way to free y'rself from any system of control is to do something useless.
Rob Davis
#6. Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?
Pablo Picasso
#7. I read whenever possible, and I buy books all the time, sometimes online, but mostly from bookshops. I love literature. If you want to understand art, it's important to understand what is also happening in literature, in music, in science, in architecture.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
#8. Only someone who doesn't understand art tells an artist their art somehow failed. How the fuck can art fail? Art can't be graded, because it's going to mean something different to everyone. You can't apply a mathematical absolute to art because there is no one formula for self-expression.
Kevin Smith
#9. I don't understand art-speak. My pictures are big doodles. I'm amazed what people come up with when they look at them. There's one of a figure with two heads that somebody thought must be a comment on the state of matrimony. None of it is a comment on anything.
Billy Connolly
#10. The critic is genius at one remove; he is not unlike an actor on the stage, and incarnates in his mind, as the actor embodies in his person, another's work; only thus does he understand art, realize it, know it; and having arrived at this, his task is done.
George Edward Woodberry
#11. I don't think there is room for 'artistic temperament.' Professional artists understand art is a business. If businesses ran their companies like many artists do their careers, they would not stay open a year.
Jack White
#12. No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.
Oscar Wilde
#13. If one does not understand the usefulness of the useless and the uselessness of the useful, one cannot understand art.
Eugene Ionesco
#14. Art should live in the heart of the people. Ordinary people should have the same ability to understand art as anybody else. I don't think art is elite or mysterious.
Ai Weiwei
#15. Do go on doing a lot of walking and keep up your love of nature, for that is the right way to understand art better and better. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see. And there are painters who never do anything that is no good...
Vincent Van Gogh
#16. I have written some poetry that I don't understand myself.
Carl Sandburg
#17. Some songs you get. Some songs you may not. And I think that's the beauty of art: to question and to ask, to understand the deeper meaning after two or three or four listenings.
Janelle Monae
#18. I hope you'll understand that I am not quoting those great words lightly. I do mean it. Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.
Ursula K. Le Guin
#19. I will never tell another person, "I don't understand you ... " and why? Because if I say that, it means that I am disabled in a way. The inability to connect to another's perspective is, I believe, a disability.
C. JoyBell C.
#20. But what does interest me is the notion that if you do a lot of work it means there's a potential for other people to understand that a lot of things are possible with a sustained effort and that the broadening of experiences is possible and I think that's all art can be.
Richard Serra
#21. Art is a lie that makes us realise truth ... that is given us to understand.
Pablo Picasso
#22. 6. A brutish man knoweth not; neither doth a fool understand this. 7. When the wicked spring as the grass, and when all the workers of iniquity do flourish; it is that they shall be destroyed for ever: 8. But thou, Lord, art most high for evermore.
Anonymous
#23. Great art is difficult," Caleb said. After a few moments, he said, "But I don't understand why it has to be so difficult sometimes.
Kevin Wilson
#24. I'll never understand the art world. But I kind of feel like there's been some art world/black metal crossovers happening for a while.
Mick Barr
#25. That is the way convince people. Or change them and prevent them from hurting whether themselves and others. Art is the most effective form of communication.
You can use it to lift the human spirit and make them understand that there is more to life than their next drug use.
Jennifer Echols
#26. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud." "So life became a work of art," I marveled.
Kurt Vonnegut
#28. Don't shut yourself up in a band box because you are a woman, but understand what is going on, and educate yourself to take part in the world's work, for it all affects you and yours.
Louisa May Alcott
#29. When somebody greedily comes along and thinks that they gonna snatch everything, and you have so many people that have not, the passion that drives me is trying to make them understand that they have to share. So, my art reflects that; the whole reason I do what I do reflects that.
Chuck D
#30. The only way to survive is to intently focus on how the art world operates. Once you understand how things work, you can find a solution to the problems you are facing.
Mark Edward
#31. We need to remind ourselves that contemporary art is first of all a form of conceptual gymnastics, in which we learn to coexist with what we don't understand.
Massimiliano Gioni
#32. I think we're much smarter than we were. Everybody knows that abstract art can be art, and most people know that they may not like it, even if they understand there's another purpose to it.
Roy Lichtenstein
#33. When I am trying to understand the method of winning in the endgame with two bishops against the knight, chess is a science, when I admire a beautiful combination or study, then chess is art, and when I am complicating position in the approaching time trouble of my opponent, then chess is sport.
Ashot Nadanian
#34. Music is the art of all the invisible things that are real. Art, emotion, spiritual essence, consciousness - these things are hard to prove. Music helps you to focus on your sound. We understand that for very young kids.
Wynton Marsalis
#35. I can never fathom it when people say things like "I can't understand abstract art!" Or: "Abstract art is junk!" Or: "Abstract art isn't as valid as realism!"
Derek R. Audette
#36. The art of good foreign policy is to understand and to take into consideration the values of a society, to realize them at the outer limit of the possible.
Henry A. Kissinger
#37. Walt Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" is still in print. They're debating right now over Mark Twain. He's still available. Winslow Homer can still be seen. Our arts are - they're there. We got to go get them and understand that this is an important legacy for our country.
Wynton Marsalis
#38. The more I've gotten interested in writing about history and making sense of myself within the continuum of history, the more I've turned to paintings, to art. I look to the imagery of art to help me understand something about my own place in the world.
Natasha Trethewey
#39. Man is used to the fact that there are languages which he does not at first understand and which must be learned, but because art is primarily visual he expects that he should get the message immediately and is apt to be affronted if he doesn't.
Edward T. Hall
#40. My parents did not discourage me but could not understand how I could make a living by art. Their idea of an artist was a person who was condemned to starvation.
Jacob Epstein
#41. I would like the people that buy my clothes to understand that for me it's one small piece of art.
Roberto Cavalli
#42. To practice kata is not to memorize an order. Find the katas that work for you, understand them, digest them & stick with them for life.
Gichin Funakoshi
#43. Wrestling is like any form of drama or pretty much any form of entertainment - some people understand this about forms of entertainment really intuitively when they're younger, and others would have to be really not very intelligent for a long time until we realize that every human mood is an art.
John Darnielle
#44. Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
Flannery O'Connor
#45. Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer; art is everything else.
Donald Ervin Knuth
#46. Coping with rejection is an important skill to learn and understand when navigating the Art World. Rejection and disinterest is the rule, not the exception.
Paul Russo
#47. If you have not linked yourself to true emptiness, you will never understand the art of peace.
Morihei Ueshiba
#48. All humans are storytellers with their own unique point of view. When we understand this, we no longer feel the need to impose our story on others or to defend what we believe. Instead we see all of us as artists with the right to create our own art.
Miguel Angel Ruiz
#49. I get the feeling that people from outside the world of contemporary art see it as deserving of mockery, in an emperor's-new-clothes sort of way. I think that's not right and that it's just because they don't understand the discourse.
Rachel Kushner
#50. I have a feeling that in art the need to understand and the need to communicate are one.
Hedda Sterne
#51. Whether art is defined as a representation of or response to reality, it demands an intense engagement with things we haven't managed to understand fully.
Joanna Scott
#52. Once there was a race, quite unlike the human race - quite. I have no way of describing to you what they looked like or how they lived, but they had one characteristic you can understand: they were creative. The creating and enjoying of works of art was their occupation and their reason for being.
Robert A. Heinlein
#53. Postmodernism does not help us understand good art. It encourages art that can be easily understood and throws in something catchy to cover the loss of mystery.
Walter Darby Bannard
#54. I am increasingly unimpressed by works of art that require a college degree to understand. I think that art should be for everyone. And people should be moved by it.
Patrick DeWitt
#55. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.
Marshall McLuhan
#56. We understand not one another: I am too courtly, and thou art too cunning. At
William Shakespeare
#57. The only art I'm interested in is the art I don't understand right away. If you understand it right away it really has no use except as nostalgia.
Lawrence Weiner
#58. That's where the songs come from: that's what I'd most want people to understand. What sounds good or looks good, that's nothing. The only worthwhile thing in art is seeing someone else's heart.
Adam Duritz
#59. For me, Christianity is not a genre. It's faith. The Gospel is not a genre either. It's faith. I definitely understand the semantics of naming things to give them some kind of distinction but I think my faith is pretty distinct. If you want to call it hip hop, essentially it is. That's the art form.
LeCrae
#60. Discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing.
Henry Moore
#61. Great leaders are those who trust their gut. They are those who understand the art before the science. They win hearts before minds. They are the ones who start with WHY.
Simon Sinek
#62. I can't understand why most people believe in medicine and don't believe in art, without questioning either.
Damien Hirst
#63. As much as you need a strong personality to build a business from scratch, you also must understand the art of delegation. I have to be good at helping people run the individual businesses, and I have to be willing to step back. The company must be set up so it can continue without me.
Richard Branson
#64. Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.
Gunter Grass
#65. No one blames themselves if they don't understand a cartoon, as they might with a painting or 'real' art; they simply think it's a bad cartoon.
Chris Ware
#66. A strong work of art really leaves people speechless. They feel a little angry because they don't understand it.
Michael Heizer
#67. 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
#68. Revolutionary or gimmicky? Shan't know until it's finished, and by then it'll be too late, but it's the first thing I think of when I wake, and the last thing I think of before I fall asleep, even if J. is in my bed. She should understand, the artist lives in two worlds.
David Mitchell
#69. The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing.
Richard Leakey
#70. I can fully understand [that] artists want to be able to pay their bills. As a fan of art, and art as a way to shift dialogue and address cultural issues, there's a part of me that's really, really saddened by that and can't really relate to it.
Bruce Pavitt
#71. We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.
Pablo Picasso
#72. To understand your fear is the beginning of really seeing.
Bruce Lee
#73. For years, I had heard about the lack of interest in literature in the U.S. and I had complained about it. I failed to understand how people could fail to be moved by art.
Rita Dove
#74. I have wanted to be a fine artist painter, and I reached the point in art schools were I'd like to understand more about images and how images communicate information to people. And I was not getting very far in that from my professors.
John Hench
#75. Art is an attempt to understand, yielding pleasure in the attempt whether or not we understand.
Robert Breault
#76. Denigrating art you don't understand doesn't hurt the art - it reveals something about your willingness to learn.
Seth Godin
#77. Art really is something very difficult. It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand. It is difficult to work out what is art and what is not art.
Anselm Kiefer
#78. 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
#79. Art does not in fact prove anything. What it does do is record one of those brief times, such as we each have and then each forget, when we are allowed to understand that the Creation is whole.
Robert Adams
#80. Before the people at large, and for that matter, the artists themselves, understand what photography really means, as I understand that term, it is essential for them to be taught the real meaning of art.
Alfred Stieglitz
#81. The art of government is the organization of idolatry. The bureaucracy consists of functionaries; the aristocracy, of idols; the democracy, of idolaters. The populace cannot understand the bureaucracy: it can only worship the national idols.
George Bernard Shaw
#82. Modern paintings are like women, you'll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.
Freddie Mercury
#83. I cannot understand why some people try to write a history of photography that is separated from the history of modern art.
Jean-Francois Chevrier
#84. Critics have a job to do. I understand that. It's not just to criticize. They're trying to interpret art for the public.
Paul Emsley
#85. He never did understand why people admired or even collected art. The greatest human artist could never hope to match what nature did with a single flower.
Peter F. Hamilton
#86. The primary purpose of the Museum is to help people enjoy, understand, and use the visual arts of our time.
Alfred H. Barr Jr.
#87. For me, my faith dictates everything I do, so no matter what I'm saying in my art, my faith is the driver for that. That's what I'd encourage people to understand as they listen to my music. It's distinct. My worldview bleeds through my music.
LeCrae
#88. The Arts, especially film, transcend all cultural barriers, hopefully offering an avenue where all people can find a common place to meet, understand each other, and nurture a safe world for all our children to grow strong within.
Carson Grant
#89. I feel I understand Existence, or at least a minute part Of my existence, only through my art,
Vladimir Nabokov
#90. Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.
Lin Yutang
#91. Understand: we live in the world of a sad separation that began some five hundred years ago when art and science split apart.
Robert Greene
#92. Art needs to be socialised, and you need a lot of context to understand that, and that doesn't mean having read a few art history books.
Peter M. Brant
#94. There is a claim coming from the West that says that all art must be outside any moral consideration. I can understand this as a provocation, but I also believe that we can still have very profound creativity with a moral sense.
Tariq Ramadan
#95. My wife is a painter, musician, and fiber artist. We married in 1993, and as she worked, I found that my reading about art was helping me understand what she was doing, just as seeing her work gave me a language with which to speak of art.
Floyd Skloot
#96. I understand that art is a necessary component of a civilized society, but you cannot just go around shooting people. That's going to be a problem.
Kevin Wilson
#97. People generally will soon understand that writers should be judged, not according to rules and species, which are contrary to nature and art, but according to the immutable principles of the art of composition, and the special laws of their individual temperaments.
Victor Hugo
#98. Everything is art and it's part of the painting. (To talk with somebody it's art, to understand a language is art, to understand a book is art, to understand somebody is art...)
Deyth Banger
#99. I think bridges have a special meaning in our life. I think a book is a bridge. Any type of art is a bridge that allows different cultures to connect. You may not understand your neighbour's way of seeing life, but you sure understand your neighbour's joy in painting or dancing.
Paulo Coelho
#100. You have to be ready to go through peaks and valleys along the way. Be ready to sacrifice some of the things in life that are considered normal for most people for the first while. And understand the business of the film industry, because studying the art and your craft alone isn't enough anymore.
Kyle Cassie
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