Art Quotes

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than their, it is because they are made with ideas.

~ G.h. Hardy

Patterns cannot be weighed or measured. Patterns must be mapped.

~ Fritjof Capra

We form a mental map, and then that shape, shapes us

~ Lois Farfel Stark

I thought of the cool, fresh air of the city I'd always dreamed of living in. The art museums and trolleys and the mysterious fog that blanketed it. I could almost smell the cappuccinos I'd planned to drink in bohemian cafes or hear the indie music in the bookstores I would spend my free time in. I pictured the friends I'd make, my kindred art people, and the dorm room I was supposed to move into.

~ Heather Demetrios

Like a spider in its web, a vibration anywhereis felt everywhere.

~ Lois Farfel Stark

SEE what you think.

~ Lois Farfel Stark

We shouldn’t abbreviate the truth but rather get a new method of presentation.

~ Edward Tufte

Life did not take over the world by combat,but by networking.

~ Lynn Margulis

No knack of drawing heads can compete with sound knowledge.

~ Andrew Loomis

The value is not in the art, whether there are more artists or less artists, the value depends on it.

~ Dada Bhagwan

A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of poems. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.

~ G.h. Hardy

His eyeless skull took in the line of costumes, the waxy debris of the makeup table. His empty nostrils snuffed up the mixed smells of mothballs, grease, and sweat. There was something here, he thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape. And yet... and yet... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from - hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in.

~ Terry Pratchett

I've never been somewhere I belonged, but there are places where I think I could be happy. Like San Francisco. Well, do art museums count? Because I feel like I belong in them.

~ Heather Demetrios

My eyes roved over the walls covered with my collages and prints of famous paintings. Magritte, Kandinsky, Kahlo. My origami shapes hung from fishing wire, dangling over my bed. They shivered in the slight breeze blowing through my open window. It was my own little escape pod, but none of it was enough tonight.

~ Heather Demetrios

Living in new shapes, reshapes our thinking

~ Lois Farfel Stark

One can show one's contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one's life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.

~ Alfred Jarry

Life is a living flute, yoga is the art of creating melody and rhythm in it.

~ Amit Ray

Don't go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines.

~ Jerry Saltz

In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they are in an abridged edition, and you lose the life of the work. Don't think that art that is alive can remain on the same level of interest throughout — and the same is true of life.

~ W.h. Auden

The impossible is what we achieve through art.

~ Eirene Evripidou

Eros and Thanatos were always the source of his inspiration, even though, from this time on, they usually appear in the guise of two simple and fundamental themes: flowers and women. These themes offered him the greatest opportunity to give a certain permanence to all that can be grasped in passing: an ephemeral sensual joy, the ecstasy of life.

~ Gilles Néret

The crucial job of artists is to find a way to release materials into the animated middle ground between subjects, and so to initiate the difficult but joyful process of human connection.

~ Ann Lauterbach

You think that I am naive, but it is you who are naive. You have no idea what is happening inside of you when you look at a painting. You think that you are getting close to art voluntarily, enticed by its beauty, that this intimacy is taking place in an atmosphere of freedom and that delight is being born in you spontaneously, lured by the divine rod of Beauty. In truth, a hand has grabbed you by the scruff of the neck, led you to this painting and has thrown you to your knees. A will mightier than your own told you to attempt to experience the appropriate emotions. Whose hand and whose will? That hand is not the hand of a single man, the will is collective, born in an interhuman dimension, quite alien to you. So you do not admire at all, you merely try to admire.

~ Witold Gombrowicz

Some elements appear in this picture which would be decisive in Klimt's subsequent work: for instance, the use of gold and the transformation of anatomy into ornamentation, of ornamentation into anatomy.

~ Gilles Néret

To fall in love with pain is to fall in love with art.

~ Dominic Riccitello

Let us summarize these three points more concisely:(a) The rejection of art as a mere emotional, individualistic, and romantic affair.(b) “Objective” work, undertaken with the silent hope that the end product will nevertheless eventually be regarded as a work of art.(c) Consciously goal-directed work in architecture, which will have a concise artistic effect on the basis of well-preparated objective-scientific criteria.Such an architecture will actively raise the general standard of living. This represents the dialectic of our development process, which purports to arrive at the affirmative by negation — a process similar to melting down old iron and forging it into new steel.

~ El Lissitzky

As once-colonized nations seek to stand on their own, the countries once denuded of their past seek to assert their independent identities through the objects that tie them to it. The demand for restitution is a way to reclaim history, to assert a moral imperative over those who were once overlords. Those countries still in the shadow of more powerful empires seek to claim the symbols of antiquity and colonialism to burnish their own national mythmaking.

~ Sharon Waxman

As cultural politics change, museums change with them.

~ Sharon Waxman

I used to wonder: Do only ignorant laypeople gaze on the colossal bust of Ramses II at the British Museum and ask themselves how it ended up there? Is it only the unschooled visitor who looks at the soaring column from the Temple of Artemis at the Met and questions why it exists in this place?

~ Sharon Waxman

This intensely lyrical vision of the pregant woman in [i]Hope I[i] is set in an ambiguous context peopled with masks, death's heads and allegorical monsters such as Sin, Disease, Poverty and Death, all threatening the incipient life.

~ Gilles Néret

There has never been any art or literature without drink and there never will be....Unless something is done about the matter [prohibition] this country is going to the dogs. There has been no development in our art or literature for 30 or 40 years.

~ Joseph Pennell

How does a copy become more than a copy? Is art the creation of something new and original, or simply the continuous enlargement, or the distillation, of an observation that came before

~ Madeleine Thien

Her flat looked like a mess –a coloring mess. Once you enter it, you can feel like a person had eaten all the colors and paints and brushes in the whole world and threw up there. But somehow when you enter it, you wouldn’t feel the urge to throw up, actually, the colors mixed with furniture too well, the masterpieces were drawn perfectly that you feel like you are standing in an art museum.

~ Basma Salem

To imitate nature involves the verb to do. To copy is merely to reflect something already there, inertly: Shakespeare's mirror is all that is needed for it. But by imitation we enlarge nature itself, we become nature or we discover in ourselves nature's active part.

~ William Carlos Williams

Without art, a film is pure wastage of time and resources.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Melissa popped open the clattery little Rotring tin. Pencils, putty rubber, scalpel. She sharpened a 3B, letting the curly shavings fall into the wicker bin, then paused for a few seconds, finding a little place of stillness before starting to draw the flowers. Art didn't count at school because it didn't get you into law or banking or medicine. It was just a fluffy thing stuck to the side of Design and Technology, a free A level for kids who could do it, like a second language, but she loved charcoal and really good gouache, she loved rolling sticky black ink on to a lino plate and heaving on the big black arm of the Cope press, the quiet and those big white walls.

~ Mark Haddon

Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history; heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake. But which people, and who defines them? He always thought of his own art as anti-aristocratic. Did he write, as his detractors maintained, for a bourgeois cosmopolitan elite? No. Did he write, as his detractors wanted him to, for the Donbass miner weary from his shift and in need of a soothing pick-me-up? No. He wrote music for everyone and no one. He wrote music for those who best appreciated the music he wrote, regardless of social origin. He wrote music for the ears that could hear. And he knew, therefore, that all true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function.

~ Julian Barnes

There is truth in stories. There is truth in one of your paintings, boy, or in a sunset or a couplet from Homer. Fiction is truth, even if it is not fact. If you believe only facts and forget stories, your brain will live, but your heart will die.

~ Cassandra Clare

Art doesn’t give rise to anything in us that isn’t already there. It simply stirs our curious consciousness and sparks a fire that illuminates who we have always wanted to be.

~ Kamand Kojouri

To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities.

~ Jane Jacobs