Art Quotes

Eleanor was right. She never looked nice. She looked like art, and art wasn't supposed to look nice; it was supposed to make you feel something.

~ Rainbow Rowell

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

Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.

~ Clive Barker

Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

~ Chuck Klosterman

There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.

~ Coco Chanel

Infantile love follows the principle: I love because I am loved. Mature love follows the principle: I am loved because I love. Immature love says: I love you because I need you. Mature love says: I need you because I love you.

~ Erich Fromm

You can’t, if you can’t feel it, if it neverRises from the soul, and swaysThe heart of every single hearer,With deepest power, in simple ways.You’ll sit forever, gluing things together,Cooking up a stew from other’s scraps,Blowing on a miserable fire,Made from your heap of dying ash.Let apes and children praise your art,If their admiration’s to your taste,But you’ll never speak from heart to heart,Unless it rises up from your heart’s space.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The Artist always has the masters in his eyes.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything you can imagine is real.

~ Pablo Picasso

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

~ George Bernard Shaw

If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.

~ Émile Zola

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.

~ Woody Allen

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

~ John Keats

Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master-and that is what Auguste Rodin was-can look at an old woman, protray her exactly as she is...and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be...and more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo, or even you, see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart...no matter what the merciless hours have done to her. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn't matter to you and me; we were never meant to be admired-but it does to them.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

~ Oscar Wilde

Style is the answer to everything.A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thingTo do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without itTo do a dangerous thing with style is what I call artBullfighting can be an artBoxing can be an artLoving can be an artOpening a can of sardines can be an artNot many have styleNot many can keep styleI have seen dogs with more style than men,although not many dogs have style.Cats have it with abundance.When Hemingway put his brains to the wall with a shotgun,that was style.Or sometimes people give you styleJoan of Arc had styleJohn the BaptistJesusSocratesCaesarGarcía Lorca.I have met men in jail with style.I have met more men in jail with style than men out of jail.Style is the difference, a way of doing, a way of being done.Six herons standing quietly in a pool of water,or you, naked, walking out of the bathroom without seeing me.

~ Charles Bukowski

Closed in a room, my imagination becomes the universe, and the rest of the world is missing out.

~ Criss Jami

Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire - it tells you how to desire.

~ Slavoj Žižek

The beautiful is always bizarre.

~ Charles Baudelaire

Art is to console those who are broken by life.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can.

~ Danny Kaye

I have an idea that the only thing which makes it possible to regard this world we live in without disgust is the beauty which now and then men create out of the chaos. The pictures they paint, the music they compose, the books they write, and the lives they lead. Of all these the richest in beauty is the beautiful life. That is the perfect work of art.

~ W. Somerset Maugham

When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.

~ Criss Jami

Here’s to freedom, cheers to art. Here’s to having an excellent adventure and may the stopping never start.

~ Jason Mraz

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

~ Albert Camus

It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.

~ John Irving

Art is the reason I get up in the morning, but the definition ends there. It doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define.

~ Ani Difranco

I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.

~ Carrie Fisher

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

~ Ray Bradbury

In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.

~ Tom Robbins

Bring something incomprehensible into the world!

~ Gilles Deleuze

Vital lives are about action. You can't feel warmth unless you create it, can't feel delight until you play, can't know serendipity unless you risk.

~ Joan Erickson

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

~ Madonna

Art and life are subjective. Not everybody's gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.

~ Whoopi Goldberg

Stop trying to be less of who you are. Let this time in your life cut you open and drain all of the things that are holding you back.

~ Jennifer Elisabeth

I think there is a song out there to describe just about any situation.

~ Criss Jami

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

~ John Ruskin

Be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else--that's how you'll get ahead.

~ Austin Kleon

The preparation of good food is merely another expression of art, one of the joys of civilized living…

~ Dione Lucas