Art Quotes

Art that most inspires are the ones that pay attention to aspects of the subconscious condition that we are too busy to notice.

~ Vd.

God gave you the art to talk and you will just ignore it like these?

~ Deyth Banger

The human spirit’s unquenchable drive for originality and compulsion for creating art is the compelling force of our humanity.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

We view art in order to escape our own skins, to get outside of the commotion inside our skulls.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Nothing's better for art than a little old-fashioned suffering.

~ J.c. Lillis

Don't be fooled into thinking that love is special. That it'll fill you up forever. Anyone can fall in love, but only you can make the art you were born for. And that's the kind of happiness that lasts.

~ J.c. Lillis

Art doesn't depend on suffering. That's a crock. It's about discipline. Showing up to do the thing you do. It's about watching and listening to the world and telling the truth with your own voice. It's about learning from what other people make, whether it's good or bad. And the most important thing? It's about taking care of yourself. So you can keep making and finishing your shit, for as long as you can.

~ J.c. Lillis

Art lives upon discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and the comparison of standpoints.

~ Henry James

The riskiness of Art, the reason why it affects us, is not the riskiness of its subject matter, it is the risk of creating a new way of seeing, a new way of thinking.

~ Jeanette Winterson

Art becomes art only when it’s shared with others.

~ Ben Tolosa

Good. That is it. You will see with your hands, I promise you.

~ Jandy Nelson

True mastery transcends any particular art. It stems from mastery of oneself--the ability, developed through self-discipline, to be calm, fully aware, and completely in tune with oneself and the surroundings. Then, and only then, can a person know himself.

~ Bruce Lee

Art allows us to die over and over without actually dying. Only we must catch our breath.

~ Meia Geddes

Creating any type of art is an actual experience inasmuch as it affects the artist’s life. The experience of writing not only merges disparate parts of the mind, this expressive experience affects the evolution of the self. Writing is not about the process of creating a piece of literature; rather, writing is an artistic, transformative experience. All opposite forces in human nature are reconciled in the unity of consciousness, which is why the most fully developed human being strives to makes their unconsciousness thoughts, feelings, and prejudices conscious through acts of contemplation.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

A painter, who finds no satisfaction in mere representation, however artistic, in his longing to express his inner life, cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art. And from this results that modern desire for rhythm in painting, for mathematical, abstract construction, for repeated notes of colour, for setting colour in motion.

~ Wassily Kandinsky

My business is to paint what I see, not what I know is there.

~ J.m.w. Turner

To those that are not accustomed to it the inner beauty appears as ugliness because humanity in general inclines to the outer and knows nothing of the inner.

~ Wassily Kandinsky

God’s creation is the greatest of all arts.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

All of life is an amphitheater where we each serve as an appreciative member of the audience until the sublime play ends with our death. The chapters and verses in our life story reflect what we value – how appreciative we are for our time to work, play, laugh, cry, and create.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Art is a distinct form of human communication. Art interprets experience, sensation, and feelings. An artistic work translates our mental images and allows other people to understand what we feel; art conveys our happiness, sadness, hopes, doubts, anxieties, fears, desires, and ineffable longings.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

An artist adopts a radically different view regarding the importance of time than a businessperson does. Instead of perceiving time as a merchantable facet doled out incrementally according to marketplace demands, an artist portrays time as an agent of destruction. The irrevocability of time frames the human condition. Time might the medium of all human experience, but its passage obscures and eventually obliterates all human endeavors. Time unchecked leads to a blank slate of nothingness. Time’s destructive march towards meaningless is arrested through memory and art depicting humankind’s struggles and accomplishments.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

~ Tracy Weinzapfel

Making art requires a degree of intentionality. All works of art require a contemplative individual drawing from their bank of knowledge and immersion into the realms of memory and imagination in order to make an outward, communicative expression. Only human beings can draw upon the dialectical tension between memory and imagination to create artistic renderings.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Age in itself gives substance — what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer’s mind.

~ Jane Hirshfield

I let quiet shape what I say, then realize there is nothing that can be fully said—the reason for gestures and eyes and art. Always something waiting, wanting, expectant, yet also curiously not.

~ Meia Geddes

Do you want to know why I don't like the so-called connoisseurs of arts? I hate hypocrisy. I'll give you an example: if the movie is colored and tells us about two friends who sit in the pool, fart into the water, get out of the pool and fart into each other's face it will be thrash, a lack of a culture and a third-rate comedy. But if the movie is black-and-white and tells us about two friends who cross the desert and peeing on each other, shit on the sand, and then they eat each other's shit, and on top of that they fucking each other's ass it will be a brilliant art house movie.

~ Ilze Falb

These two developments throw light on what is perhaps the most fundamental difference between the Renaissance and all previous periods of art. We have repeatedly seen that there were these circumstances which could compel the artist to make a distinction between the technical proportions and the objective; the influence of organic movement, the influence of perspective foreshortening, and the regard for the visual impression of the beholder. These three factors of variation have one thing in common: they all presuppose the artistic recognition of subjectivity. Organic movement introduces into the calculus of artistic composition the subjective will and the subjective emotions of the thing represented; foreshortening the subjective visual experience of the artist; and those eurhythmic adjustments which alter that which is right in favor of what seems right, the subjective visual experience of a potential beholder. And it is the Renaissance which, for the first time, not only affirms but formally legitimizes and rationalizes these three forms of subjectivity.

~ Erwin Panofsky

Music is energy, emotion, expression, escapism, enlightenment. Music is so much more than just entertainment.

~ Rasheed Ogunlaru

We are told that in translation there is no such thing as equivalence. Many times the translator reaches a fork in the translating road where they must make a choice in the interpretation of a word. And each time they make one of these choices, they are taken further from the truth. But what we aren’t told is that this isn’t a shortcoming of translation; it’s a shortcoming of language itself. As soon as we try to put reality into words, we limit it. Words are not reality, they are the cause of reality, and thus reality is always more. Writers aren't alchemists who transmute words into the aurous essence of the human experience. No, they are glassmakers. They create a work of art that enables us to see inside to help us understand. And if they are really good, we can see our own reflections staring back at us.

~ Kamand Kojouri

Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.

~ W.e.b. Du Bois

I'll write about my past but I won't talk about it. I'll turn it into art if I can, but I won't talk about it.

~ Anne Rice

Some art are meant to cut shortstretching them unnecessary makes it dull.

~ Yarro Rai

An artist is like a handicaphe needs his art to carry himself.

~ Yarro Rai

Those who like to interpret historical facts symbolically may recognize in this the spirit of a specifically modern conception of the world which permits the subject to assert itself against the object as something independent and equal; whereas classical antiquity did not as yet permit the explicit formulation of this contrast; and whereas the Middle Ages believed the subject as well as the object to be submerged in a higher unity.

~ Erwin Panofsky

Many works would be senseless, real junk, but for the fact that, being art, they are exhibited because they have a message of almost religious importance, interpreting man and his world - yes, perhaps even as junk.

~ H. R. Rookmaaker

Nobody is better than me.

~ Jason Innocent

I'm the greatest living thing in the universe.

~ Jason Innocent

Even creating shit is hard to do. First, you need money to buy food. Then you have to chew it, eat it, and swallow. A complex process called digestion follows. Finally, you have to strain and excrete your foul smelling wonder into the world. Try doing that with a paint brush!

~ Jonathan Heatt

The harder you work, the more you produce, the more you create, the more you will be rejected. By people who never created shit.

~ Jonathan Heatt

There is a dialectic between common humanity and particular ways of being human.

~ Howard Morphy