Art Quotes

That is an artist as I love artists, modest in his needs: he really wants only two things, his bread and his art - panem et Circen.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

~ Andrew Wyeth

Mastering the art of seduction gives one a great power, and like any power, it's to be wielded with responsibility; a man who wields the art of seduction without a sense of responsibility and restraint is a walking proximity bomb of viral epidemics, needless procreation, heartbroken families, and shattered dreams.

~ Mike Norton

Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others' choices make us.

~ Richie Norton

It is an example of what films can do, how they can slip past your defenses and really break your heart.

~ David Gilmour

Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make.

~ Corita Kent

Nobody has ever taken a photograph of something they want to forget. We can build a wall of happy Kodak moments around ourselves, a wall of our Christmases, birthdays, baby showers and weddings, but we can never forget that celluloid film is see-through, that behind it, all the misery of real life waits for our wall to collapse someday.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

If you participate in life, you don’t see it clearly: you suffer from it too much or enjoy it too much. The artist, to my way of thinking, is a monstrosity, something outside nature. All the misfortunes Providence inflicts on him come from his stubborness in denying that maxim.

~ Gustave Flaubert

...how absurd human beings are and how magnificent.

~ Benjamin Zander

To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.

~ Arthur Conan Doyle

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

~ Oscar Wilde

To evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling - this is the activity of art.

~ Leo Tolstoy

I like a girl with a substantial bottom,' said Renoir, drawing in the air the size bottom he preferred.

~ Christopher Moore

I have treated many artists. There are among them many neurotics, so many that one finally comes to believe that one cannot be an artist without being neurotic. Again I found in them that inner conflict which is characteristic of modern man: the conflict between a right intuition (namely, that their vocation has fundamental importance for the destiny of humanity) and a false idea (namely, that art is superfluous luxury).

~ Paul Tournier

Sometimes it is better not to talk about art by using the word art. If we just act with awareness and integrity, our art will flower, and we don't have to talk about it at all.

~ Thich Nhat Hanh

His judgement demonstrates that one can be a genius and understand nothing of an art that is not one's own.

~ Victor Hugo

Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.

~ Rollo May

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us.

~ Marcel Proust

No respect for beauty – that was characteristic of today’s society. The works of the great masters were at most employed as ironic references, or used in advertising. Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam’, where you see a pair of jeans in place of the spark. The whole point of the picture, at least as he saw it, was that these two monumental bodies each came to an end in two index fingers that almost, but not quite, touched. There was a space between them a millimetre or so wide. And in this space – life. The sculptural size and richness of detail of this picture was simply a frame, a backdrop, to emphasise the crucial void in its centre. The point of emptiness that contained everything. And in its place a person had superimposed a pair of jeans.

~ John Ajvide Lindqvist

Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.

~ Lawrence Durrell

Just as when we step into a mosque and its high open dome leads our minds up , up , to greater things , so a great carpet seeks to do the same under the feet .Such a carpet directs us to the magnificence of the infinite , veiled , yet never near , closer than the pulse of jugular , the sunburst that explodes at the center of a carpet signals this boundless radiance . Flowers and trees evoke the pleasures of paradise, and there is always a spot at the center of the carpet that brings calm to the heart. A single white lotus flower floats in a turquoise pool , and in this tiniest of details, there it is : a call to the best within , summoning us to the joy of union .in carpets , I now saw not just intricacies of nature and color , not just mastery of space , but a sign of the infinite design . In each pattern lay the work of a weaver of the world, complete and whole ; and in each knot of daily existence lay mine .

~ Anita Amirrezvani

He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.

~ G.k. Chesterton

(speaking of Ann Radcliffe) A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood.

~ André Breton

I've been told my old city possesses a 'thriving arts scene,' whatever that is; personally, I think artists should lie low and stick to their work, not line-dance through the parks.

~ Walter Kirn

I think comedy as an art involves the audience as a participant as much as is involves the artist.

~ Craig Ferguson

Although the art world reveres the unconventional, it is rife with conformity. Artists make work that looks like art and behave in ways that enhance stereotypes. Curators pander to the expectations of their peers and their museum boards. Collectors run in herds to buy work by a handful of fashionable painters. Critics stick their finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing so as to get it right. Originality is not always rewarded, but some people take real risks and innovate, which gives a raison d'être to the rest.

~ Sarah Thornton

Art is anything you can get away with.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

The burden God places on each of us is to become who we are meant to be. We are most fully ourselves when Christ most fully lives in us and through us. The mother shines brightest with her child in her arms, the father when he forgives his wandering son, and the artist when he or she is drawing attention to grace, by showing the pinprick of light overcoming the darkness in the painting, or the story, or the song. The world knows darkness. Christ came into the world to show us light. I have seen it, have been blinded by it, invaded by it. I will tell its story.

~ Andrew Peterson

I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.

~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.

~ Corita Kent

He had been standing still; for an artist, one of the more painful forms of death.

~ Irving Stone

To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self disciplined is to follow in a better way.

~ Corita Kent

It is a thing of no great difficulty to raise objections against another man's oration, it is a very easy matter; but to produce a better in it's place is a work extremely troublesome.

~ Plutarch

Art like life is an open secret.

~ Lawrence Durrell

I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light.

~ Miles Davis

Art is neither a profession nor a hobby. Art is a Way of being.

~ Frederick Franck

As an artist, if your work doesn't inflame at least part of the audience, then you might as well call it quits and sell insurance... The world needs more boundary pushers, not more boundary creators.

~ Alys Arden

But however good you get at translating personality into line or paint it's no go if your personality isn't worth translating.

~ John Fowles

Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. (1804)

~ Benjamin Constant

I am for an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary. I am for an art that takes its form from the lines of life itself, that twists and extends and accumulates and spits and drips, and is heavy and coarse and blunt and sweet and stupid as life itself.

~ Claes Oldenburg