Art Quotes

If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.

~ George Eliot

Horror is the law of the world of living creatures, and civilization is concerned with masking that truth. Literature and art refine and beautify, and if they were to depict reality naked, just as everyone suspects it is (although we defend ourselves against that knowledge), no one would be able to stand it.

~ Czesław Miłosz

That day I behaved like a good artist, one whose job is to build rather than break.

~ Anuradha Bhattacharyya

I love the smell of pastels...that breaths life into my soul.

~ Ama H. Vanniarachchy

This is the second Old Master I have encountered that has the signatures of another artist forged over it. A painting that has been created by another artist entirely. It's like they played mix and match.

~ Dayna S. Rubin

Life is art.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The absence of models, in literature as in life, to say nothing of painting, is an occupational hazard for the artist, simply because models in art, in behavior, in growth of spirit and intellect--even if rejected--enrich and enlarge one's view of existence. Deadlier still, to the artist who lacks models, is the curse of ridicule, the bringing to bear on an artist's best work, especially his or her most original, most strikingly deviant, only a fund of ignorance and the presumption that as an artist's critic one's judgement is free of the restrictions imposed by prejudice, and is well informed, indeed, about all the art in the world that really matters.

~ Alice Walker

When art calls, you have to follow it. It doesn’t happen often, so take the opportunity when it strikes. In all reality, what I do is art. I do create fabulous pieces of decorative baked goods.

~ A.m. Willard

The minute we moved in (1712 North Crescent Heights), Dennis Hopper decided to give a party for Andy (Warhol), who was coming out to Los Angeles, and he decided that the one thing that would really make the house stand out, fabulously, would be billboards. So he papered the downstairs bathrooms with billboards. He had also decided that the food at the party would be hot dogs and chili. So we had a hot-dog stand! And Dennis had found huge papier-mâché Mexican figures with firecrackers hanging on them.

~ Brooke Hayward

Not having enough talent seemed almost worse than not having any, because having a little meant having just enough to know what you lacked

~ Kat Howard

In the end the soul is itself the longing of the soulless for salvation.

~ Theodor W. Adorno

Allow the courage to create overwhelmed you.

~ Micheline Jean Louis

In De Rerum Natura, Lucretius pointed out a very central truth concerning the examined life. That is, that the man of science who concerns himself solely with science, who cannot enjoy and be enriched by art, is a misshapen man. An incomplete man.

~ William Styron

ART happens every time we live in the spirit of the moment’s greatness from Cinderella in Focus

~ H.l. Balcomb

Personally, I'm not much for symbolism. I never get it. Why can't things be just as they are? I never thought to psychoanalyze Seymour Glass or sought to break down Desolation Row. I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else, slip a wreath on a steeple top solely because I wished it.

~ Patti Smith

Just take my hand, lead, dance with me...and I will simply follow the blueness of the water, the white waves rolling free...where the earth beneath my feet and stars make my heart whole again...in long and priceless moments of shared solitude...

~ Oksana Rus

The serenity of the lulling ocean is a wondrous thing to behold..more precious than the gems coveted and covered in platinum or gold...

~ Oksana Rus

Infatuated painted clouds, enamored of our silky bed-lagoon, reflect with silent tremors your sweetest of the kisses...whispers...then lightly consume its shining sunset skin with loving smiles greeting the lacy starry night ahead...making our senses dance so softly stepping on to the adorn petals of the place no one else knows...

~ Oksana Rus

No amount of art, even of the Great American variety, can elevate you above, or insulate you from, the divisions, the cataclysms, of ordinary life.

~ Garth Risk Hallberg

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one's own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with events, but with the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind...The best that one can say of most modern creative art is that it is just a little less vulgar than reality, and so the critic, with his fine sense of distinction and sure instinct of delicate refinement, will prefer to look into the silver mirror or through the woven veil, and will turn his eyes away from the chaos and clamor of actual existence, though the mirror be tarnished and the veil be torn. His sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books written, and marble hewn into form.

~ Oscar Wilde

Everyday objects shriek aloud.

~ René Magritte

Art is everywhere.

~ A.d. Posey

All art is a form of vulnerability because at least part of the artist goes into the piece.

~ A.d. Posey

We need to insist on making culture out of our desire: making paintings, novels, plays and films potent and seductive and authentic enough to undermine and overwhelm the Iron Maiden.

~ Naomi Wolf

The power of the artform is stronger than stone, the poet says, and chooses the sonnet, a form concerned with argument and persuasion, to say so. This sonnet, he says, will last longer than any gravestone-and you'll be made shinier, brighter, by it. In this form it will-and therefore you will-avoid destruction by war, history, time generally; it'll even keep you alive after death; in fact it'll form a place for you to live, not die, where you'll be seen in the eyes of and the context of this love right to the end of time.

~ Ali Smith

And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left-say we lost everything-we'd still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognised line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we've forgotten we even know it.

~ Ali Smith

A painting walks into the room supported by the collector. It is the painting of a nude by a contemporary artist. She is scarred by shadows from venetian blinds. “The ritual scarification of light and shadow,” I say. But am thinking, silently, the female nude is the self-ironization of the male. She, in his shadow, by design.

~ Carla Harryman

Who says that art and science cannot coincide? Art is seen as subjective, and science is seen as objective. Paintings, drawings, and sculptures can contain geometric patterns. Most anything you can mix in a beaker or a Petri dish could be displayed as art. The point is that there is art in science, and there is science in art.

~ Jen Selinsky

To me, he is art, poetry for the eyes and heart. He is the most terrifyingly beautiful guy I have ever seen. And his scars have to tell a story...

~ Jessica Sorensen

Art is life.

~ A.d. Posey

Every work of art tells a story.

~ A.d. Posey

My father said that artists see the world differently than normal people. I see a tree where you mights see a collection of lines, shapes, and shadows.

~ Stacey H. Lee

Many years before, Ka had explained to me that when a good poet is confronted with difficult facts that he knows to be true but also inimical to poetry, he has no choice but to feel to the margins; it was, he said, this very retreat that allowed him to hear the hidden music that is the source of all art.

~ Orhan Pamuk

Style jazzes up your canvas.

~ A.d. Posey

Most great products have been made over the dead bodies of experts.

~ David Brown

In the event that everything goes wrong and I’m not here tomorrow, there’s not enough time to fuck around. Why make art? Because it beautifies the world. It’s above people. It’s idealistic. It’s something to strive for that is not the mundane. It gives people peace of mind. It’s something you reach for that you can barely tickle but not quite get a hold of. And this [outpouring] makes that idealistic beauty so bright that you’d have to be a bitter asshole to deny its existence.

~ Josh Homme

Poetry is a storm asking peace to dance with her.

~ Jenim Dibie

You are the Poem I dreamed of writing, the Masterpiece I longed to paint. You are the shining Star I reached for in my ever hopeful quest for life fulfilled. Yes, I am Blessed.

~ Oksana Rus

Why does man need bread? To survive. But why survive if it is only to eat more bread? To live is more than just to sustain life - it is to enrich, and be enriched by, life.

~ Shashi Tharoor

If women have failed to make “universal” art because we’re trapped within the “personal,” why not universalize the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?

~ Chris Kraus