What Is Good Art Quotes

#1. I do not know what evil is when it comes to art. I only know what is good art and what is bad art.

Chaim Potok

#2. There are some disabling myths about what art is, how to do it, what is good art, and what art is for, that have gagged generations, depriving them of significant and natural means of expression. This is a terrible loss and an unnecessary one.

Peter London

#3. One often reads about the art of conversation-how it's dying or what's needed to make it flourish, or how rare good ones are. But wouldn't you agree that the infinitely more valuable rara avis [rare bird] is a good listener.

Malcolm Forbes

#4. every good artist paints what he is

Jackson Pollock

#5. What is bad for the heart is good for art. The terrible irony of our lives as artists.

Jandy Nelson

#6. What makes a good work of art is something that honors certain traditions and breaks with others.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#7. Science is not just there for technology. It's part of what addressing who you are in the universe and understanding your place in the cosmos. Good art, good literature, good music - all of that is for that and science is a part of it.

Lawrence M. Krauss

#8. 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

#9. One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art.

Sally Mann

#10. Good can be a stifling word, a word that makes you hesitate and stare at a blank page and second-guess yourself and throw stuff in the trash. What's important is to get your hands moving and let the images come. Whether it's good or bad is beside the point. Make art.

Austin Kleon

#11. People whose understanding and taste in literature, painting, and music are beyond question are, for the most part, ignorant of what is good or bad art in the theater.

Minnie Maddern Fiske

#12. Personally I think that competition should be encouraged in war and sport and business, but that it makes no sense in the arts. If an artist is good, nobody else can do what he or she does and therefore all comparisons are incoherent.

Edward St. Aubyn

#13. For good-intentioned people making decisions, there's no such thing as a bad choice. So it doesn't matter what you choose. Choose something, then deliberately line up with the choice you make. This is the art of alignment and allowing. (paraphrased)

Abraham Hicks

#14. All good art is political. Between the lines of every book, the author implants messages for the unsuspecting reader. If not, what point does it serve?

Chloe Thurlow

#15. Philosophy is the art and law of life, and it teaches us what to do in all cases, and, like good marksmen, to hit the white at any distance.

Seneca The Younger

#16. There's a purpose to knowledge ... salvation. What good are my visions or your visions, beautifully and laboriously worked out in art, if the purpose of it is not to save something in our souls and make it all beautiful.

Jack Kerouac

#17. What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

Henri Matisse

#18. This is what makes me happy: ... Any music-free restaurant ... A grandson who offers to clean the snow off my driveway and also fix my computer ... An evening in bed with a good book ... A good night's sleep ... As you can see, it doesn't take much to make me happy.

Art Buchwald

#19. No one can really explain in a rational way what makes a good photograph or a bad photograph ... This is why the art world will not throw billions of dollars at photography the way it has at painting; and that is what makes it an exciting medium.

David Wojnarowicz

#20. There's not much high and low culture any more: there's just mingling streams of art and what matters is whether it's good art or bad art.

Neil Gaiman

#21. Keep a good heart. That's the most important thing in life. It's not how much money you make or what you can acquire. The art of it is to keep a good heart.

Joni Mitchell

#22. It was odd to have something so personal out there in that way, but the good thing about art is that no one necessarily knows what you mean by it anyway.

Gabrielle Zevin

#23. Today, like any other day, is totally incomprehensible. It's good to be in a state of wonder and be alive to what's happening.

Art Hochberg

#24. If we are going to change our diets, we first have to relearn the art of eating, which is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. We have to find a way to want to eat what's good for us.

Bee Wilson

#25. What I do as an art form is try to make people feel good and if I do try to make them feel bad, it's for a reason. There's something I am trying to say.

Jim Carrey

#26. For, while the authority of the doctor or plumber is never questioned, everyone deems himself a good judge and an adequate arbiter of what a work of art should be and how it should be done.

Mark Rothko

#27. Somebody on the Internet thinks what you do is stupid or evil, or it's all been done before? Make good art.

Neil Gaiman

#28. Agreements about what is good or not, are usually not worth much. It is very much like art, is it not an art to lead a good life?

Albert Einstein

#29. What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.

'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment.

Natasha Pulley

#30. What's really good about the word 'art' is that 'art' is a word like 'love,' or 'god,' or whatever. It transcends so many things ...

Tracey Emin

#31. The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.

C.S. Lewis

#32. What art should do, I think, is advance the generation into the next era. It should be one step ahead of the ordinary, ahead of what is already known. Art is what pulls on the next age. I'm not saying that my art is that, but that it would be good if it could be.

Andy Couturier

#33. The poem in Where Good Swimmers Drown are love poems. But love poems that defy the divisions between emotion and intellect, private and public, life and art, writer and reader. To read Elbe's poems is to discover not only what it means to be in love, but what it means to be alive.

Jesse Lee Kercheval

#34. What gives my art the most meaning is when I can connect with others through it. When people say that my music has helped them, or it makes them feel good, or it inspires them, that is what gives my art lasting meaning to me.

Lindsey Stirling

#35. There's an expression, "God is in the details," and it applies to nothing more than it does to the writing of fiction. To that and to the art of telling good lies. And what is fiction but the telling of lies?

Donna Levin

#36. Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do. Make good art.

Neil Gaiman

#37. What I'm good at is making art.

Jock Sturges

#38. The price we sell things for is not important. What is important is we sell art that has to be replaced. You become good in art by doing art. The more you sell, the more you must produce.

Jack White

#39. As my poor father used to say In 1963, Once people start on all this Art Goodbye, moralitee! And what my father used to say Is good enough for me.

A.P. Herbert

#40. I don't see what else you can spend your money on ... If you want to own things, art is a pretty good bet.

Damien Hirst

#41. Later film shoots' casting calls would advertise that they're "fun shoots" and a "good way to get exposure" - but working in entertainment is not entertaining, even though it is not what's traditionally thought of as "work." You know what's fun, indie filmmakers? Being paid for your time.

J. Richard Singleton

#42. I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.

Marilynne Robinson

#43. Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgment. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art, and life, a different - a supplementary - set of standards.

Susan Sontag

#44. The state of female artists is very good. But the very definition of art has been biased in that 'art' was what men did in a European tradition and 'crafts' were what women and natives did. But it's actually all the same.

Gloria Steinem

#45. I try to imagine what it must be like to have art inside of you and then to not have it anymore. To lose it, to not be able to find it, to search for it... Maybe that is a good reason to kill yourself.

Courtney Summers

#46. To be a good artist, you have to serve the work of art and allow it to be what it is supposed to be.

Larry Wall

#47. The worst thing you can do is make a cult movie. That means you got three great reviews and nobody went. An art film means it got a lot of good reviews and nobody went. There is no such thing as a counter culture now. What used to be considered that is commercial now.

John Waters

#48. The good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it.

Oscar Wilde

#49. Among the guitarists, Wes Montgomery is fantastic. He's always good to let you know what the art form is all about. It's the same still life that everybody is painting, but in comes Wes Montgomery, and it's right there!

Bill Cosby

#50. Well, I've been blessed with good hair, or at least some people think it is. It is the way it is, sort of does what it wants to. So, yeah, I guess it is [a metaphor for your views on art and life].

David Lynch

#51. The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#52. Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.

Freya Stark

#53. I am concerned with social and environmental issues. What rational person is not? But advocacy and art do not mix. Art is a seduction. Good art invites the reader to think and feel deeply and come to his/her own conclusions.

T.C. Boyle

#54. She was a shrewd woman, and knew that the art of life is to know when to stop talking. What words have accomplished, too many words can undo. "Good-bye.

P.G. Wodehouse

#55. Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

Aldous Huxley

#56. One of the things you're doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.

Brian Eno

#57. The role of a museum of modern art is to make a good selection and identify what we believe to be the coming movements, and that requires taste.

David Rockefeller

#58. I see 30 to 40 gallery shows a week, and no matter what kind of mood I'm in, no matter how bad the art is, I almost always feel better afterward. I can learn as much from bad art as from good.

Jerry Saltz

#59. The straightforward manner is seldom equal to the complications of the good subject. There may never be anything new to say, but there is always a new way to say it, and since, in art, the way of saying a thing becomes a part of what is said, every work of art is unique and requires fresh attention.

Flannery O'Connor

#60. I like connecting with people, and that's what good art is: a point of connection. There's nothing better, on stage or on film.

Ruth Negga

#61. What's nice about both clouds, and art, is that you can look at them and just resonate. That can be good for both the heart and the mind.

Ogden W. Rogers

#62. Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Alice Walker

#63. I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher could more wish to be than a good dancer. For the dance is his ideal, also his fine art, finally also the only kind of piety he knows, his 'divine service.'

Friedrich Nietzsche

#64. Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration ... tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils

Francis Bacon

#65. I am of the opinion that the appreciation and the desire for what is good takes more study and insight than does the understanding and test for the best music and art.

Laurance Rockefeller

#66. Do you know what good art is? It is saying "ta" to God.

Stanley Spencer

#67. As for the author, he is profoundly unaware of what the classical or romantic genre might consist of ... In literature, as in allthings, there is only the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, the true and the false.

Victor Hugo

#68. I realized that I wasn't naturally born to good taste. I understand what it is, but I am happy to wear bright colors. I do have a few items of black clothing, but I think good taste and doing the same thing over and over again is what the whole art world has become.

Jim Shaw

#69. Art is what can't be proven mathematically, right, it's where science ends. It's the part that makes you feel good, but you don't know why.

Jim McKelvey

#70. What would life be without art? Science prolongs life. To consist of what-eating, drinking, and sleeping? What is the good of living longer if it is only a matter of satisfying the requirements that sustain life? All this is nothing without the charm of art.

Sarah Bernhardt

#71. Good art is a form of prayer. It's a way to say what is not sayable.

Frederick Busch

#72. Good Hobbinoll, what garres thee greete?
What! hath some wolfe thy tender lambes ytorne?
Or is thy bagpype broke, that soundes so sweete?
Or art thou of thy loved lasse forlorne?

Edmund Spenser

#73. 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

#74. Philosophy? What good is that?" Isn't it the art of saying nothing with as many words as possible?

Brandon Sanderson

#75. He who is discontented with what he has, and with what has been granted to him by fortune, is one who is ignorant of the art of living, but he who bears that in a noble spirit, and makes reasonable use of all that comes from it, deserves to be regarded as a good man.

Epictetus

#76. There's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is popular or unpopular. What is banned in Boston may be bid on at Christie's.

Ron Brackin

#77. I really don't know what's good or bad art because all the art I like people tell me is tasteless.

Ed Sheeran

#78. Difference making, by its very nature, is the art of taking something good and making it better. It's an act of fine-tuning, improving, and refining, not starting from zero.

David Sturt

#79. It's not about exact measurements or ingredients', shrugged Lomax, when Joseph complained. 'Good food is about feeling. Cooking is an art, not a science. You got to have soul to feed people right.' He smiled. 'That's what this is. Soul food.

Alex George

#80. I very much enjoyed Leo Tolstoy's What is Art? I can't quote it, it's been a while, but at the end of the day, the idea is that "art that does good in the world is art, and what doesn't is not. It's propaganda or something else. It's bad."

Scott Avett

#81. The art market is global now, and there's becoming more of an international consensus about what constitutes good art.

Larry Gagosian

#82. On the whole, lying is a cheerful affair. Embellishments are intended to give pleasure. People long to tell you what they imagine you want to hear. They want to amuse you; they want to amuse themselves; they want to show you a good time. This is beyond hospitality. This is art.

Isabel Fonseca

#83. What I have in mind is that art may be bad, good or indifferent, but, whatever adjective is used, we must call it art, and bad art is still art in the same way that a bad emotion is still an emotion.

Marcel Duchamp

#84. If what you want to do is make good art, decide what's good and try to imitate it.

Robert Pinsky

#85. But, as sculpture and painting are gifts of God, what I insist on is, that both shall be used purely and lawfully, that gifts which the Lord has bestowed upon us, for His glory and our good, shall not be preposterously abused, nay, shall not be perverted to our destruction.

John Calvin

#86. You see, painting has now become, or all art has now become completely a game, by which man distracts himself. What is fascinating actually is, that it's going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to become any good at all.

Francis Bacon