Art Quotes

Music is for souls & hearts to dance & sing.Art is for expressing your visionary being.Words are tools for exploring & celebrating.Time is a pool to swim & dream & create in.Waste not one jot of what you are given!Use everything you've got to maximise living.

~ Jay Woodman

I could either succumb to the nightmares I’ve raised or paint them.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

I believe that when you step into uncharted territory, you are also stepping into total abandonment, potential humiliation, and a space where nothing is guaranteed; there’s no case study or roadmap. I have so much respect for anybody who will step away from what they can do in order to find what they must do. That’s a hallmark characteristic of entrepreneurs and artists. And it’s scary and exciting as all hell.

~ Elle Luna

Reality is not enough for us, that’s why we have invented art to create different realities!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The faculty of art is to change events, the faculty of science is to foresee them. The phenomena with which we deal are controlled by art, they are predicted by science.

~ Henry Thomas Buckle

Such terms as 'diagnosis' and 'pathology' are of course used analogically here, but I am using the word 'science' deliberate and unequivocally in its original and broad sense of discovery and knowing, rather than its conventional sense of isolating the secondary causes of natural phenomena. For if I believe anything, it is that the primary business of literature and art is cognitive, a kind of finding out and knowing and telling, both in good times and bad; a celebration of the way things are when they are right, and a diagnostic enterprise when they are wrong.

~ Walker Percy

While visual art is a thing of timeless beauty, to me, music is so much more. It brings you back to some of the greatest moments in your life. It represents so much more than just noise, it tingles and fills you with feelings. Overwhelms you with emotions of joy or sadness; comfort or anger. Like when you first hear a song that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up, made you want to dance, or go out and kick someone's a**. Music is truly a thing of absolute beauty.

~ Jacob Cagnina

Obstacles cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to stern resolve. He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.

~ Leonardo Da Vinci

It's either perfect, or it's the worst thing ever made and everyone is an artistic failure, including myself. (Yay, emotional extremes!)

~ Felicia Day

But Hannah's friend didn’t understand the volatile balancing act between art and sanity, that the act of creation was like walking a tightrope during an earthquake. She didn’t understand Hannah’s stupid need for validation, or that the size of the audience increased the stakes and multiplied the fear. She didn’t understand that creativity was dangerous, that, yes, there were some people who could stand before a canvas, paint a sunset that would bring the world to its knees, and return to their loved ones as a complete person who didn’t hurt, didn’t cry, didn’t spill blood to appease the host of fickle muses. But Hannah did. Hannah’s best ideas—sometimes her only ideas—were buried beneath the skin.

~ Jake Vander-Ark

A man who makes a plate or a shirt or a loaf of bread or anything our great great ancestors called a work of art, has no need to try to be sincere; all he can do is practice his craft to the best of his ability. But once he starts making useless things, how can he not be sincere?

~ René Daumal

Once art served to educate and edify, now it distracts and amuses.

~ James Rozoff

Feedback doesn’t tell you about yourself. It tells you about the person giving the feedback. In other words, if someone says your work is gorgeous, that just tells you about *their* taste. If you put out a new product and it doesn’t sell at all, that tells you something about what your audience does and doesn’t want. When we look at praise and criticism as information about the people giving it, we tend to get really curious about the feedback, rather than dejected or defensive.

~ Tara Mohr

It does not much matter that an individual loses two or three hundred pounds in buying a bad picture, but it is to be regretted that a nation should lose two or three hundred thousand in raising a ridiculous building.

~ John Ruskin

People are fond of spouting out the old cliché about how Van Gogh never sold a painting in his lifetime. Somehow his example serves to justify to us, decades later, that there is merit in utter failure.Perhaps, but the man did commit suicide. The market for his work took off big-time shortly after his death. Had he decided to stick around another few decades he most likely would’ve entered old age quite prosperous. And sadly for failures everywhere, the cliché would have lost a lot of its power.The fact is, the old clichés work for us in abstract terms, but they never work out in real life quite the same way. Life is messy; clichés are clean and tidy.

~ Hugh Macleod

Dance is your words expressed with movement.

~ Pablito Greco

When an artist is asked to speak about form, you expect something different than when a critic talks about it. Because you think that somewhere between sentences and words, the secret will slip out. I am trying to give you that secret; it isn't a secret at all, but it is building solidly, not using secrets. I had been trying to extend into metaphysical extension; that film is changing, metamorphic; that is, infinite; the idea that the movement of life is totally important rather than a single life. My films were built on an incline, an increase in intensity. I hoped to make a form which was infinite, the changingness of things. I thought I would want to find a total form which conveyed that sense, particularly in reference to an Oriental subject. My impression was: one is walking down a corridor of a hotel. One hears a sound, opens a door and a man is playing; one listens for three minutes and closes the door. The music went on before you opened the door and it continues after you close the door. There was neither beginning nor end. Western music increases in intensity to a climax and then resolves itself. Oriental music is infinite; it goes on and on. The Chinese theater goes on for hours and hours with time for lunch moving scenery, etc.

~ Maya Deren

Dance is the language of artistic kinesis.

~ Pablito Greco

I wish to approach truth as closely as is possible, and therefore I abstract everything until I arrive at the fundamental quality of objects.

~ Piet Mondrian

A peaceful feeling: A happy harmony or symphony of all of our character pieces working in powerful unison” from Cinderella In Focus

~ H.l. Balcomb

All my life’s work will drain away without ever being realized. For a sculptor, working with their hands is crucial and hands must be supported by a strong and supple back. And I work with sturdy materials that need dexterity and strength to handle — metal and stone and sometimes even bricks! How do I do any of it now?

~ Radhika Mukherjee

At the Uffizi, I experienced a moment that was touching, painful, and almost embarrassing. We stopped in front of the famous Botticelli painting, The Birth of Venus. I gazed wistfully at her incomparably lovely, yet, as Vasari described, oddly distorted form emerging from the waves in a seashell, her long red-golden tresses blown by Zephyrs. No woman ever had so elongated a neck or such sinuous limbs. Botticelli contorted, and some might say deformed, the human shape to give us a glimpse of the sublime.

~ Gary Inbinder

In the heart of appeasement there's the fear of rejection, and in acts of fear there are mirrors of oppression.

~ Criss Jami

Feet on the ground, head in the clouds. That's how giants walk.

~ Andrea Pomelli

We all have an artistic side that we have to express if we want to live a life that feels whole.

~ Dhani Jones

Dance is moving sculpture.

~ Pablito Greco

This was a family that consumed attractive, talented people. Its aim was to preserve beauty and genius through the centuries. For all eternity. To bottle the spark of magic that flares up in the soul of an artist, to preserve in wax the pain that is born in the heart of an actor, to dry and store the subtle, shifting images that hover above the head of a writer.Madness. They didn't realize it was impossible. As the years pass by, feelings and emotions are blunted. And thousands of years of life kill all feelings. The soul becomes cold. It can't burn anymore. The farys took away from humans the one thing that I sought and valued in them most of all—their bright, vital feelings.

~ Lena Meydan

Dance fotografers/videografers (ph=f) capture a moment in movement, while dancers get birth of their artscience.

~ Pablito Greco

Art is not about achievement, but rather a new perspective to look from.

~ Armin Houman

Other young women were more than kind when it came to teaching him the basics of makeup artistry, but he did not like the idea of foundation, knowing enough alchemy to realize it had historically been made with lead and mercury.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual,only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

In time, all great masterpieces turn into shameless creatures who laugh at their creators.

~ Erol Ozan

An artist reveals his naked soul in his work - and so, gentle reader, do you when you respond to it.

~ Ayn Rand

What happens when you combine your passion, strength and value? This is the process of creating true art.

~ J.r. Rim

Every young sculptor seems to think that he must give the world some specimen of indecorous womanhood, and call it Eve, Venus, a Nymph, or any name that may apologize for a lack of decent clothing. I am weary, even more than I am ashamed, of seeing such things. Nowadays people are as good as born in their clothes, and there is practically not a nude human being in existence. An artist, therefore, as you must candidly confess, cannot sculpture nudity with a pure heart, if only because he is compelled to steal guilty glimpses at hired models. The marble inevitably loses its chastity under such circumstances. An old Greek sculptor, no doubt, found his models in the open sunshine, and among pure and princely maidens, and thus the nude statues of antiquity are as modest as violets, and sufficiently draped in their own beauty. But as for Mr. Gibson's colored Venuses (stained, I believe, with tobacco juice), and all other nudities of to-day, I really do not understand what they have to say to this generation, and would be glad to see as many heaps of quicklime in their stead.

~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium

~ Oscar Wilde

If you don't know it's impossible, it's easier to do.

~ Neil Gaiman

What is always needed in the appreciation of art, or life, is the larger perspective. Connections made, or at least attempted, where none existed before, the straining to encompass in one's glance at the varied world the common thread, the unifying theme through immense diversity, a fearlessness of growth, of search, of looking, that enlarges the private and the public world. And yet, in our particular society, it is the narrowed and narrowing view of life that often wins

~ Alice Walker

Art is the reflection of an imaginative mind.

~ Debasish Mridha

A successful actor is praised for never giving up his dreams to become someone else for a living but to dream to be an unmasked artist is a mortal sin in a consumerist society. Artists don't consume; they create things that can’t be consumed with riches. You consume art by seeing, by listening, by feeling, never by buying.

~ Bruce Crown