Top 100 Works Of Art In Quotes
#1. Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.
E. M. Forster
#2. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. I love making up visual works of art in language. I get to be an artist without actually being an artist in that sense.
Siri Hustvedt
#7. In some Arab art exhibitions that have happened, there's always this idea that the East is more traditional; they show a lot of works on calligraphy and religion.
Massimiliano Gioni
#8. Art itself, in all its methods, is the child of religion. The highest and best works in architecture, sculpture and painting, poetry and music, have been born out of the religion of Nature.
James Freeman Clarke
#9. Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.
George Edward Woodberry
#10. She works on her never-ending project for hours at a time. In art school they talked about day jobs in tones of horror. She never would have imagined that her day job would be the calmest and least cluttered part of her life.
Emily St. John Mandel
#11. We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.
Clive Bell
#12. Above all else, it is about leaving a mark that I existed: I was here. I was hungry. I was defeated. I was happy. I was sad. I was in love. I was afraid. I was hopeful. I had an idea and I had a good purpose and that's why I made works of art.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres
#13. Works of Art can only be produc'd in Perfection where the Man is either in Affluence or is Above the Care of it.
William Blake
#14. Art is not an investment. Art is something you buy because you are financially solvent enough to give yourself a pleasure of living with great works rather than having to just see them in museums. People who are buying art at the top of the market as an investment are foolish.
Arne Glimcher
#15. It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part.
Henry David Thoreau
#17. 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
#18. An exhibition is in many ways a series of conversations. Between the artist and viewer, curator and viewer, and between the works of art themselves. It clicks when an exhibition feels like it has answered some questions, and raised even more.
Thelma Golden
#19. How certain human beings are able to create works of art is a mystery, and why they should wish to do so, at a great cost to themselves usually, is another mystery. Works are not created by one's life; every life is rich in material.
Elizabeth Hardwick
#20. But all categories of art, idealistic or realistic, surrealistic or constructivist (a new form of idealism) must satisfy a simple test (or they are in no sense works of art): they must persist as objects of contemplation.
Herbert Read
#21. To persons uninstructed in natural history, their country or seaside stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with wonderful works of art, nine-tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall.
Thomas Huxley
#22. Poe had this curious kind of alchemical courage, where he took all the terrible things and terrors that happened in his life, all this shame and fear and pain, and turned them into great works of art. He was a complex, brilliant person who was just wired too tight.
John Cusack
#23. The conventional notions of art have changed, and a lot of things done today are considered works of art that would have been rejected in the past.
David Rockefeller
#24. There is in every artist's studio a scrap heap of discarded works in which the artist's discipline prevailed against his imagination.
Robert Breault
#25. Every inch of land there is so contested," I observed, more to myself than to him. "How many lives have been lost fighting over Jerusalem? Yet it is not special in terms of architecture, or location, or works of art.
Margaret George
#26. But art is not simply works of art; it is the spirit that knows Beauty, that has music in its being and the color of sunsets in its headkerchiefs; that can dance on a flaming world and make the world dance, too.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#27. Works of Art are meant to connect the human heart to inspiration, for cosmic consciousness to grow in the Supreme Reality rooted in Life and Being.
Nelly Mazloum
#28. Everyone who works with love and with intelligence finds in the very sincerity of his love for nature and art a kind of armor against the opinions of other people.
Vincent Van Gogh
#29. And when they encounter works of art which show that using new media can lead to new experiences and to new consciousness, and expand our senses, our perception, our intelligence, our sensibility, then they will become interested in this music.
Karlheinz Stockhausen
#30. Years ago I decided that the greatest need in our Country was Art ... We were a very young country and had very few opportunities of seeing beautiful things, works of art ... So, I determined to make it my life's work if I could.
Isabella Stewart Gardner
#31. There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.
Alfred Stieglitz
#32. When I look at great works of art or listen to inspired music, I sense intimate portraits of the specific times in which they were created.
Billy Joel
#33. most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never trod, and more unutterable than them all are works of art, whose life endures by the side of our own that passes away.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#35. Life is more important than art - quantity is only important in that the amount of activity is greater not the number of works.
Patrick Swift
#36. References to all works of art, tombs, tunnels, and architecture in Rome are entirely factual
Dan Brown
#37. In order to gain some insight into the forces that elevate certain products to the level of 'works of art' it is helpful - among other investigations - to look into the economic and political underpinnings of the institutions, individuals and groups who share in the control of power.
Hans Haacke
#38. For me, the '60s in the automotive industry was awesome. The cars are heavy, huge, rolling works of art.
Apolo Ohno
#39. Poetry is not an end in itself but in the service of life; of what use are poems, or any other works of art, unless to enable human lives to be lived with insight of a deeper kind, with more sensitive feelings, more intense sense of the beautiful, with deeper understanding?
Kathleen Raine
#40. O fairest of creation, last and best Of all God's works, creature in whom excelled Whatever can to sight or thought be formed, Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet! How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost, Defaced, deflow'red, and now to death devote? Paradise Lost
John Milton
#41. A certain strangeness, something of the blossoming of the aloe, is indeed an element in all true works of art: that they shall excite or surprise us is indispensable.
Walter Pater
#42. When you present works of art, one thing I've learned is that if you're lucky - [Laughs] - there will be those few people who, shall we say, get it? Really become engaged, become moved by it in their own way. You cannot control what other people are going to think about it.
Robert Barry
#43. Comprehensibility is the highest law of all. Unity must be there. There must be means of ensuring it. All the things familiar to us from primitive life must also be used in works of art.
Anton Webern
#44. I've seen nerdists make tributes to their obsessions out of Legos that are like works of art. It just goes to show you how pervasive this stuff has become in our culture. It really is an ideology that you can subscribe to now.
Chris Hardwick
#45. Time is, in fact, a cross to bear, it passes on inexorably and remorselessly, destroying everything in its wake, save art and works of the intellect.
Jack Schmitt
#46. People so often loose sight of the magic in life once they understand how it works.
Thomas Rogal II
#47. Tombs decked by the arts can scarcely represent death as a formidable enemy; we do not, indeed, like the ancients, carve sports and dances in the sarcophagus, but thought is diverted from the bier by works that tell of immortality, even from the altar of death.
Madame De Stael
#48. [Audubon's works are] the most splendid monuments which art has erected in honor of ornithology.
Georges Cuvier
#49. Architecture exhibits the greatest extent of the difference from nature which may exist in works of art. It involves all the powers of design, and is sculpture and painting inclusively. It shows the greatness of man, and should at the same time teach him humility.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#50. During her life she was in Rivera's shadow. She was framed as the 'Wife of the Master Mural Painter [who] Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art', as the patronizing headline of the Detroit News proclaimed in February 1933. Today, Rivera is known as Frida's husband.
Gannit Ankori
#51. It is only with the best judges that the highest works of art would lose none of their honor by being seen in their rudiments.
John Frederick Boyes
#52. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#53. Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.
Paul Valery
#54. It is my conviction that the public always shows itself more honest in its spontaneity than do those who officially set themselves up as judges of works of art.
Igor Stravinsky
#55. Learn how to meditate on paper. Drawing and writing are forms of meditation. Learn how to contemplate works of art. Learn how to pray in the streets or in the country. Know how to meditate not only when you have a book in your hand but when you are waiting for a bus or riding in a train.
Thomas Merton
#56. All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.
W. H. Auden
#57. The magician depends for the success of his art upon the credulity of the people. Whatever mystifies, excites curiosity; whatever in turn baffles this curiosity, works the marvelous.
Alexander Herrmann
#58. I don't have any particular wish to be polemical or didactic; I don't have a 'message', but what I do thoroughly enjoy are those works of art, not necessarily in the cinema, but in the other arts as well, which have an encyclopaedic world.
Peter Greenaway
#59. 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
#60. O fairest of all creation, last and best
Of all God's works, creature in whom excelled
Whatever can to sight or thought be formed,
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!
How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost,
Defaced, deflow'red, and now to death devote?
John Milton
#61. Fashion week is very inspiring, and you can't look at things one dimensionally. And I think that everyone who works in this industry has a very three-dimensional view of what fashion is and what art is.
Mark Indelicato
#62. I cared nothing; my point of view in that instance, as in all others like it, was, that if the paper chose to send an outsider and an ignoramus to criticise works of art - especially the works of a new and tentative and experimental school - then, on the head of the paper let the just doom fall.
Arthur Machen
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. 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
#67. I think Christians should be leaders in art, science, philanthropy, charity, and all kinds of good works. We should be good examples for everyone. Unfortunately though, that's not often the case.
Matt Smith
#68. It is sometimes forgotten how much wit there is in certain works of abstract art. There is a certain point in undergoing anguish when one encounters the comic.
Robert Motherwell
#69. 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
#70. Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in daily fidelity.
Albert Camus
#71. 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
#72. What does Art do for us? It gives shape to our emotions, makes them visible, and, in so doing, places a seal of eternity upon them, a seal representing all those works that, by means of a particular form, have incarnated the universal nature of human emotions.
Muriel Barbery
#73. 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
#74. It is in the ardent revolutionist to whom the joys of art, of science, even of family life, seem bitter, so long as they cannot be shared by all, and who works despite misery and persecution for the regeneration of the world.
Pyotr Kropotkin
#75. Taste is, in general, considered as that faculty of the human mind by which we perceive and enjoy whatever is beautiful or sublime in the works of nature or art.
Sir Archibald Alison, 2nd Baronet
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. I have no real training in the history of fine art or furniture; my eye just works by proportions. I react intuitively. In London, it's all about color because the weather is so gray, and in that cold light they look beautiful.
Mario Testino
#82. All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.
Robert Henri
#83. 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
#84. The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art? The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task.
John Dewey
#85. Just think for a moment if science really could move in the field of authenticity of works of art. There would be a cultural revolution to say the least, but also, I would say, a market revolution, let me add.
Maurizio Seracini
#86. That doesn't mean that I would destroy those works, or that I'm not proud of having come out the other side. Our past art makes our present art as much as our past life makes us who we are now. In the end, if the art stands up, that's what matters.
Kat Howard
#87. A paint brush is the only tool I use extensively in my works, to push paint on canvas and conduct melodies. And that's exactly what Garden Avenue is, and all of my projects after that.
Shawn Lukas
#88. Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us - flesh and bone - only to be spewed out again in our own works.
Siri Hustvedt
#89. There is sometimes a greater judgement shewn in deviating from the rules of art, than in adhering to them; and?there ismore beauty inthe works of a great genius who is ignorant of all the rules of art, than in the works of a little genius, who not only knows but scrupulously observes them.
Joseph Addison
#90. I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a first person singular.
Orhan Pamuk
#91. But I think it will bring you something besides this, something that is the knowledge of real strength in art: not that you should imitate the works of these men; but their artistic spirit, their artistic attitude, I think you should absorb that.
Oscar Wilde
#92. It is in general true that in order to create works of art one has to have leisure. On the other hand I think that one needs to experience resistance in a practical sense, and even that which is poignant to bring out what makes easy reading for others. Too much deprivation of course, means death.
Marianne Moore
#93. In taste and imagination, in the graces of style, in the arts of persuasion, in the magnificence of public works, the ancients were at least our equals.
Thomas B. Macaulay
#94. Real beauty in the arts is eternal and would be accepted at all periods; but it wears the dress of its century: something of that dress clings to it, and woe to the works which appear in periods when the general taste is corrupted.
Eugene Delacroix
#95. I do believe in an everyday sort of magic
the inexplicable connectedness we sometimes experience with places, people, works of art and the like; the eerie appropriateness of moments of synchronicity; the whispered voice, the hidden presence, when we think we're alone.
Charles De Lint
#96. 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
#97. There is a desire of property in the sanest and best men, which Nature seems to have implanted as conservative of her works, and which is necessary to encourage and keep alive the arts.
Walter Savage Landor
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. 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
