Art Quotes

It's impossible for a creative artist to be either a Puritan or a Fascist, because both are a negation of the creative urge. The only things a creative artist can be opposed to are ugliness and injustice.

~ Liam O'flaherty

There are only two styles of portrait painting: the serious and the smirk.

~ Charles Dickens

The arts can sharpen the vision, quicken the intellect, preserve the memory, activate the conscience, enhance the understanding and refresh the language.

~ Steve Turner

I asked Geertrui the other day what she thought love is-real love, true love. She said that for her real love is observing another person and being observed by another person with complete attention. If she's right, you only have to look at the pictures Rembrandt painted of Titus, and there are quite a lot, to see that they loved each other. Because that is what you're seeing. Complete attention, one of the other...but in that case

~ He Said

If you find yourself pulled beyond all practicality toward doing something -- writing poetry, building a business, restoring old cars, planting a secret garden; if at four in the morning the right word comes to you, the perfect flower to plant in that particular spot -- you are playing your invisible instrument.

~ Joan Oliver Goldsmith

Every great artist has the sense of provocation.

~ Arthur Cravan

It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art.

~ Hermann Bahr

Be yourself. An original is worth more than a copy.

~ Suzy Kassem

Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative individuals in the arts. We also came to realize that we in Canada cannot truly understand the great cultures of the past and of other peoples, until we ourselves commence our own creative life in the arts. Until we do so, we are looking at these from the outside.

~ Lawren Harris

Art’s only concern with the real is to abolish it, and to substitute for it a new reality

~ Jean Rousset

Young Bindo Altovini, looking out from time, made a perfect coalition with the mountains, the sky, and the tall redheaded woman who had bent over just slightly to examine a raging battle that was long over. Alessandro imagined that Bindo Altovini was saying, half with longing, half with delight, These are the things in which I was so helplessly caught up, the waves that took me, what I loved. When light filled my eyes and I was restless and could move, I knew not what all the color was about, but only that I had a passion to see. And now that I am still, I pass on to you my liveliness and my life, for you will be taken, as once I was, and although you must fight beyond your capacity to fight and feel beyond your capacity to feel, remember that it ends in perfect peace, and you will be as still and content as am I, for whom centuries are not even seconds.In the eyes of Bindo Altoviti, Alessandro saw wisdom and amusement, and he knew why the subjects of paintings and photographs seemed to look from the past as if with clairvoyance. Even brutal and impatient men, when frozen in time, assumed expressions of extraordinary compassion, as if they had reflected the essence of their redemption back into the photograph. In a sense they were still living.

~ Mark Helprin

In trying to be perfect, He perfected the art of anonymity, Became imperceptible And arrived nowhere from nowhere.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

In the arts, as in life, everything is possible provided it is based on love.

~ Marc Chagall

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.

~ Walter Pater

An artist that makes art merely to meet a demand is a slave to what his patrons wants to see, or, hear.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Art is nothing more than creating an emotion in your own form.

~ Shannon L. Alder

He wrote me a note to say we would create art together and we would make it, with or without the rest of the world.

~ Patti Smith

Lines are results, do not draw them for themselves. ... Lines give birth to lines. Drawing is not following a line on the model, it is drawing your sense of the thing. ... Make a drawing flow, stopping sometimes, and going on. ... Search for the simple constructive forces, line the lines of a suspension bridge. Get the few main lines and see what lines they call out. ... Have purpose in the places where lines stop.

~ Robert Henri

The typical English painting is narrative in character. The English are a nation of diarists.

~ Neville Weston

Our mind is the canvas on which the artists lay their colour; their pigments are our emotions; their chiaroscuro the light of joy, the shadow of sadness. The masterpiece is of ourselves, as we are of the masterpiece.

~ Kakuzō Okakura

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.All art is quite useless.

~ Oscar Wilde

Every artist has thousands of bad drawings in them and the only way to get rid of them is to draw them out.

~ Chuck Jones

Art is not in some far-off place.

~ Lydia Davis

I think that is what film and art and music do, they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.

~ Bruce Springsteen

In Japan, a number of time-honored everyday activities (such as making tea, arranging flowers, and writing) have traditionally been deeply examined by their proponents. Students study how to make tea, perform martial arts, or write with a brush in the most skillful way possible to express themselves with maximum efficiency and minimum strain. Through this efficient, adroit, and creative performance, they arrive at art. But if they continue to delve even more deeply into their art, they discover principles that are truly universal, principles relating to life itself. Then, the art of brush writing becomes shodo—the “Way of the brush”—while the art of arranging flowers is elevated to the status of kado—the “Way of flowers.” Through these Ways or Do forms, the Japanese have sought to realize the Way of living itself. They have approached the universal through the particular.

~ H.e. Davey

Since art is considered a noble field, art should be used to promote all that is good and noble, and in a noble fashion.

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too.

~ William Saroyan

If seeing her an hour before her lastWeak cough into all blackness I could yetBe held by chalk-white

~ Mervyn Peake

A great spirit has been amongst us, and a great artist is gone.

~ Ezra Pound

Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular.

~ Naomi Klein

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.

~ Morton Feldman

Music is art, and art is an integral part of the human experience.

~ Anne Frasier

I intend to destroy, destroy everything that exists in painting. I have utter contempt for painting.

~ Juan Miro

O Divine Poesy, goddess, daughter of Zeus, sustain for me this song of the various-minded man who, after he had plundered the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy, was made to stay grievously about the coasts of men, the sport of their customs, good and bad, while his heart, through all the sea-faring, ached with an agony to redeem himself and bring his company safe home. Vain hope – for them. The fools! Their own witlessness cast them aside. To destroy for meat the oxen of the most exalted Sun, wherefore the Sun-god blotted out the day of their return. Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, O Muse.” – from Homer’s Odyssey, translation by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)

~ Steven Pressfield

For the first time in his life, he stopped worrying about results, and as a consequence the terms “success” and “failure” had suddenly lost their meaning for him. The true purpose of art was not to create beautiful objects, he discovered. It was a method of understanding, a way of penetrating the world and finding one’s place in it, and whatever aesthetic qualities an individual canvas might have were almost an incidental by-product of the effort to engage oneself in this struggle, to enter into the thick of things.

~ Paul Auster

I think that's what art is: art is communication made in the hope that interesting miscommunications will arise.

~ Misha Glouberman

Photography is like stealing.You rob someone of a moment that exposes something essential about their character,their soul if you like.there are people who are very conscious of that,who find that terrifying.The thought that everyone,friend of foe,can get so close to you,look you straight in the eye and judge you without having any control over it or being able to respond.A part of them has become the property of the photographer.

~ Esther Verhoef

...to make art is to realize another's sadness within, realize the hidden sadness in other people's lives, to feel sad with and for a stranger.

~ Marianne Wiggins

Like the sundial, my paint box counts no hours but sunny ones.

~ Arthur Rackham

Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one's psychic life.

~ Stephen Greenblatt