Art Quotes

Beauty surrounds us, but oftentimes it takes a person with a poetic perception, an artist’s way of looking at the world, to first notice the sublime, and then stagecraft the splendor of nature so that other people can perceive their synoptic vision. The spirit and aesthetic intention behind the work is what assigns the work its artistic quality. Great works of poetry and writing, for instance, express not simply a criticism of life, but also encompass a philosophy for living.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

This world is of a single piece; yet, we invent nets to trap it for our inspection. Then we mistake our nets for the reality of the piece. In these nets we catch the fishes of the intellect but the sea of wholeness forever eludes our grasp. So, we forget our original intent and then mistake the nets for the sea.Three of these nets we have named Nature, Mathematics, and Art. We conclude they are different because we call them by different names. Thus, they are apt to remain forever separated with nothing bonding them together. It is not the nets that are at fault but rather our misunderstanding of their function as nets. They do catch the fishes but never the sea, and it is the sea that we ultimately desire.

~ Martha Boles

I felt the sharp sting of emptiness and solitude that you feel so acutely and with such internal sorrow and wonder whenever music is performed well.

~ Pat Conroy

Beauty is itself so unattainable that it escapes altogether; and the true artist, like the true Mystic, can never rest

~ Aleister Crowley

Art is a place where tragedy meets beauty. An artist is someone who creates the most beautiful things of his life when his soul starts bleeding.

~ Akshay Vasu

...maybe that's art. Seeing beauty others miss and capturing it.

~ Jules Barnard

Cal opens a drawer, pulls out a sketch pad and charcoal and sets them down on a drafting table.'Let's draw.'I smile the way I did as a child when receiving a fresh box of 64 Crayola crayons, unabashedly showing all my teeth. I remember how much I used to love to draw, and I wonder why I don't do it anymore. I write, I guess. I draw with words, but when I see Cal's pad and charcoal, I'm overwhelmed with the feeling that it's not the same. I use my words, my artist's charcoal to describe what I'm thinking. He draws with an imperfect fluidity, pausing only occasionally to shade the drawing with his thumb or brush the paper with the back of his hands. He listens and nods and doesn't interrupt. And when I'm done speaking he looks at the drawing, and his eyes get really big. Slowly, he turns his pad around for me to see. My heart stops and then starts. 'Yes,' I say. It's perfect. Alive with added detail and beautiful Inuit soulfulness I couldn't have even imagined sitting outside in my car. My fear is gone. There's a tingling in my skin, like I can feel the thousand needle pricks to come. I am alive.

~ Steven Rowley

What is the beauty of a thing if others do not take pleasure in it.

~ Gerald Mills

The impression given us by a person or a work (or an interpretation of a work) of marked individuality is peculiar to that person or work. We have brought with us the ideas of “beauty,” “breadth of style,” “pathos” and so forth which we might at a pinch have the illusion of recognising in the banality of a conventional face or talent, but our critical spirit has before it the insistent challenge of a form of which it possesses no intellectual equivalent, in which it must disengage the unknown element. It hears a sharp sound, an oddly interrogative inflexion. It asks itself: “Is that good? Is what I am feeling now admiration? Is that what is meant by richness of colouring, nobility, strength?” And what answers it again is a sharp voice, a curiously questioning tone, the despotic impression, wholly material, caused by a person whom one does not know, in which no scope is left for “breadth of interpretation.” And for this reason it is the really beautiful works that, if we listen to them with sincerity, must disappoint us most keenly, because in the storehouse of our ideas there is none that responds to an individual impression.

~ Marcel Proust

... those who seek the lost Lord will find traces of His being and beauty in all that men have made, from music and poetry and sculpture to the gingerbread men in the pâtisseries, from the final calculation of the pure mathematician to the first delighted chalk drawing of a small child.

~ Caryll Houselander

People want what was best about the world.

~ Emily St. John Mandel

Captured by the ideological animus, both socialist and liberal-democratic art abandoned the criterion of beauty - considered anachronistic and of dubious political value - and replaced it with the criterion of correctness.

~ Ryszard Legutko

Beauty and desire to possess have driven men mad for centuries.

~ Hannah Rothschild

Nothing is really beautiful unless it is useless; everything useful is ugly, for it expresses a need, and the needs of man are ignoble and disgusting, like his poor weak nature. The most useful place in a house is the lavatory.

~ Théophile Gautier

Hopper’s paintings are full of women like her; women who appear to be in the grips of a loneliness that has to do with gender and unattainable standards of appearance, and that gets increasingly toxic and strangulating with age.

~ Olivia Laing

I keep breaking things, as if to see what's going on inside of me.

~ Jenim Dibie

You despise the real bourgeois classes for all their snobbishness and their snobbish voices and ways. You do, don't you? Yet all you put in their place is a horrid little refusal to have nasty thoughts or do nasty things or be nasty in any way. Do you know that every great thing in the story of art and every beautiful thing in life is actually what you call nasty or has been caused by feelings that you would call nasty? By passion, by love, by hatred, by truth. Do you know that?

~ John Fowles

Be calm...calm as a calm lagoon, then you will look beautiful as a beautiful calm lagoon crowned by the Moon and sheltered by the brilliance of the stars reclaiming your royalty of regal life...

~ Oksana Rus

Re-programming your mind, body & spirit is like planting a garden, if the soil isn't right nothing will grow.

~ Nikki Rowe

It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

~ Walter Pater

A great philosopher once said: 'We are what we Contemplate'And in these modern times when mankind is constantly confronted with images of conflict and world disasters, it seems very important to contemplate the Beautiful. It has become my personal crusade as an artist, to create images which uplift and nurture the human heart; to create that which serves as a reminder of what is Sacred and Beautiful within the drama of Life....Ever since I can remember, my innermost nature has always been to do acts of kindness and to create, from saving lost animals, to organizing charitable events; from mothering my four children to now giving birth to the 'Art of Beauty'.

~ Ginger Gilmour

Listen to the sunset...see its pretty hue... When you see it, think of me...and I'll think of you...

~ Oksana Rus

For me, a hearty laugh is one of the most beautiful sounds in the world. It's a way of life!

~ Oksana Rus

...art had no moral responsibility. Art, he argued, should strive only to be a beautiful object entirely separate from its creator.

~ Oscar Wilde

Art is an expression of inner beauty.

~ Debasish Mridha

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

~ Paul Gauguin

Your life is your canvas. You are responsible for the beauty of your art.

~ Debasish Mridha M.d.

The need for beauty and the [artistic] creation which embodies it is inseparable from man, and without it man would possibly not want to live in the world.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You were born an original work of art. Stay original always. Originals cost more than imitations.

~ Suzy Kassem

Art is a culmination of all that one stands for

~ Aporva Kala

The Christian in the one whose imagination should fly beyond the stars.

~ Francis A. Schaeffer

A Christian should use these arts to the glory of God, not just as tracts, mind you, but as things of beauty to the praise of God. An art work can be a doxology in itself.

~ Francis A. Schaeffer

In God's world the individual counts. Therefore, Christian art should deal with the individual.

~ Francis A. Schaeffer

How should an artist begin to do his work as an artist? I would insist that he begin his work as an artist by setting out to make a work of art.

~ Francis A. Schaeffer

Christian art today should be twentieth-century art.

~ Francis A. Schaeffer

But we must be aware that art cannot be used to show the validity of Christianity, it should rather be the reverse. Christianity is true, things and actions and human endeavor only get their meaning from their relationship to God.

~ H. R. Rookmaaker

To try to talk about art and about Christianity is for me one and the same thing, and it means attempting to share the meaning of my life, what gives it, for me, its tragedy and its glory.

~ Madeleine L'engle

Art is the effort to appreciate and express the God who is its Beauty.

~ William Temple

Artists create things that point us to beauty, to truth, to God.

~ Katherine Reay

Music is an outburst of the soul.

~ Frederick Delius