Art Quotes

The perfect song neither ends nor begins. It is always playing. Remember to stop and listen.

~ Stella Mowen

He has heard, and causes those with ears to hear, even today, what we shall not see until the end of time - the whole context of Providence. As though in the light of this end, he heard the harmony of creation to which the shadow belongs but in which the shadow is not darkness, deficiency is not defeat, trouble cannot degenerate into tragedy and infinite melancholy is ultimately forced to claim undisputed sway...Mozart causes us to hear that even on the latter side, and therefore in its totality creation praises its master and is therefore perfect.

~ Karl Barth

Life as an art cannot be copied, it must be created.

~ Apollo Matrix

People have to create some sort of art so they have something to think about other than their shitty lives.

~ Leila Sales

For an artist is not a consumer, as our commercials urge us to be. An artist is a nourisher and a creator who knows that during the act of creation there is collaboration. We do not create alone.

~ Madeleine L'engle

It's good to vandalize one's own work.

~ John P. Sousa

It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.This is surely the death of all thought.This quote is taken from The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko, written 1940-1 and published posthumously in 2004 by Yale University Press, pp.126-7.

~ Mark Rothko

A 'black' man who draws a 'black' person with big lips is called observant. A 'white' man who does the same is called a racist.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Art is by nature aristocratic, and naturally selective in its effect on the audience. For even in its 'collective' manifestations, like theatre or cinema, its effect is bound up with the intimate emotions of each person who comes into contact with a work. The more the individual is traumatised and gripped by these emotions, the more significant a place will the work have in his experience.The aristocratic nature of art, however does not in any way absolve the artist of his responsibility to his public and even, if you like, more broadly, to people in general. On the contrary, because of his special awareness of his time and of the world in which he lives, the artist becomes the voice of those who cannot formulate or express their view of reality. In that sense the artist is indeed vox populi. That is why he is called to serve his own talent, which means serving his people.

~ Andrei Tarkovsky

The artistic temperament is too often only an alibi for lack of responsibility....

~ Edmund Crispin

There are no mistakes in art.

~ Maria Renteria

Regarding the creative: never assume you're the master, only the student. Your audience will determine if you're masterful.

~ Don Roff

... from the classically executed lifelike bouquets, tempting you to reach for the petals that fell on a three-dimensional tablecloth, to a new and disturbing style in which the colors seemed to blaze with such intensity they destroyed the old lines, the old solidity, to make a vision like those states which I'm nearest my delirium and flowers grow before my eyes and crackle like the flames of lamps.

~ Anne Rice

If you don't have shadows, you're not in the light.

~ Lady Gaga

Oh bell-dumb heart, it makes you a fool to think you were ever closer to opening up the world — to art, to breaking it apart — than those who came before. But knowing that can't make you read or breathe more slowly. Since when did you listen to anyone? To give up on motivation is to give up on the work we do with alphabet and light. It's not enough to hunt or haunt our parents' hearts; we must occupy our own.

~ Ander Monson

Interns, unite: you have nothing to lose but your unpaid positions!

~ Piccolo Fortunato

Work hard. Suit yourself, then you'll know at least one person is pleased.

~ Carole Estrup

Why not fall in love with an artist? Otherwise there are no letters, pictures, paintings and songs for you when you wake up.

~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Don't ask me what it means, ask me how it felt.

~ Jill Telford

Horse[Man you will find herea new representation of the universeat its most poetic and most modernMan man man man man manGive yourself up to this art where the sublimedoes not exclude charmand brilliancy does not blur the nuanceit is now or never the momentto be sensitive to poetry for it dominatesall dreadfullyGuillaume Apollinaire]

~ Guillaume Apollinaire

It's not what you look at that matters, It's what you see

~ Alphonso Dunn

We are all born artists. The nature generally doesn’t discriminate among newborns with respect to art. Yet most of us try very hard as we grow, without knowing, to stop being artists.

~ Pawan Mishra

... but as he no longer stands on his native soil, his art can't possibly have roots. An artist creates true art for his people only as long as he lives, and suffers, among them.

~ Olga Grushin

I get the sense that some people think that influence dilutes – that the more you are someone else, the less you are yourself, as if you were born with some innate distinct youness that is gradually sanded away by the corroding forces of conformity. That if you could somehow tune everything else out and really dig deep within yourself, you’d find your voice there, pure and independent.That’s bullshit. Your voice isn’t there, already made. You need to make your own voice. You need to make your own voice.

~ Raphael Bob-Waksberg

A piece of art is part of its creator, you cannot split them apart. You cannot like one and dislike another.

~ Sameh Elsayed

They say everything looks better with odd numbers of things. But sometimes I put even numbers—just to upset the critics.

~ Bob Ross

For the artisan, craft is an end in itself. For you, the artist, craft is the vehicle for expressing your vision. Craft is the visible edge of art.

~ David Bayles

Certainly a painting can be reductionistically described by its physical properties only: its shape, the paint, the design, and so forth. But every artwork that exists is both an individual thing, a whole unto itself, and simultaneously a part of the matrix of forces that brought it into being.

~ Alex Grey

Like many people who dress in black, the lump of coal was interested in becoming an artist.

~ Lemony Snicket

The present is only faced in any generation by the artist.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

Design is an art, creative artist must have a beautiful mind

~ Bhupesh B. Patil

The artist can not serve his struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates the social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.

~ Leon Trotsky

When you see a fish you don't think of its scales, do you? You think of its speed, its floating, flashing body seen through the water. Well, I've tried to express just that. If I made fins and eyes and scales, I would arrest its movement, give a pattern or shape of reality. I want just the flash of its spirits.

~ Constantin Brancusi

Nobody should ever receive more money for a work of art than the artist who produced it.

~ Pansy Schneider-Horst

The artist must be blind to recognized and unrecognized form, deaf to the teachings and desires of his time. His open eyes must be directed to his inner life and his ears must be constantly attuned to the voice of inner necessity.

~ Wassily Kandinsky

I learned that I' have to be detached if I was ever to achieve anything at all.

~ Iain Pears

You have to have time to be sorry for yourself to be a good Abstract Expressionist.

~ Robert Rauschenberg

Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense every artist is abstract.

~ Richard Diebenkorn

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

~ Ben Shahn

If an artist is not only he who sings or paints, but he who express himself by words or drawing then I can consider myself as one.

~ Amen Muffler