Art Quotes

Time and death: It's the ultimate vision of an artist at the end of everything. It's just what's there. It was not something I planned to do.

~ Don Delillo

If seeing her an hour before her lastWeak cough into all blackness I could yetBe held by chalk-white walls

~ Mervyn Peake

In the end, this volume should be read a s a collection of love stories, Above all, they are tales of love, not the love with which so many stories end – the love of fidelity, kindness and fertility – but the other side of love, its cruelty, sterility and duplicity. In a way, the decadents did accept Nordau's idea of the artist as monster. But in nature, the glory and panacea of romanticism, they found nothing. Theirs is an aesthetic that disavows the natural and with it the body. The truly beautiful body is dead, because it is empty. Decadent work is always morbid, but its attraction to death is through art. What they refused was the condemnation of that monster. And yet despite the decadent celebration of artifice, these stories record art's failure in the struggle against natural horror. Nature fights back and wins, and decadent writing remains a remarkable account of that failure.

~ Asti Hustvedt

Reinvent new combinations of what you already own. Improvise. Become more creative. Not because you have to, but because you want to. Evolution is the secret for the next step.

~ Karl Lagerfeld

Our biological rhythms are the symphony of the cosmos, music embedded deep within us to which we dance, even when we can't name the tune.

~ Deepak Chopra

I do my job like I breathe — so if I can’t breathe I’m in trouble.

~ Karl Lagerfeld

Fashion is about two things: the evolution and the opposite.

~ Karl Lagerfeld

The elegance is as physical, as moral quality that has nothing common with the clothing. You can see a countrywoman more elegant than one so called elegant woman.

~ Karl Lagerfeld

You draw characters speaking loud and clear but you’re not hearing them.” her mother told her, then she kissed her forehead and mumbled how she liked her art and went downstairs. Cecilia wrote these words on her bedroom wall, just behind her headboard for no one to see it but herself to know that it exists.

~ Basma Salem

Some of the people who hate me love some of the sentences that I have written, until they get to the name of the person to whom the sentences are attributed.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The only way to find art is to lose touch with reality.

~ Christina Strigas

My heart's been broken in a thousand pieces I've lived and died a thousand times And in each of those lifetimes With all of those pieces I chose you…A million times.

~ Jenim Dibie

Walking away ends a battle in the heart of one, and starts a war in the soul of another.

~ Jenim Dibie

Hands can cook, hands can create, hands can kill. There is no better tool than our hands.

~ Amit Kalantri

I became an artist because I wanted to be an active participant in the conversation about art.

~ Kamand Kojouri

The object of art is to give life a light through which you can imagine and see the world.

~ Debasish Mridha

Art is an expression of inner perception as an outer reality.

~ Debasish Mridha

If you write then you are reborn because by writing about the moment, you can relive it for a second time.

~ Kamand Kojouri

A picture is a fleeting moment of life preserved on a canvas.

~ Debasish Mridha

A painting is a universal language which everyone can read, understand, and interpret in his own way through the power of imagination.

~ Debasish Mridha

If you don't understand it, it's art.

~ Ljupka Cvetanova

Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.

~ Leonardo Da Vinci

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.

~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.

~ Rick Riordan

...and then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

~ Vincent Van Gogh

A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.

~ Dylan Thomas

Speak against unconscious oppression,Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,Speak against bonds.

~ Ezra Pound

creativity keeps the world alive, yet, everyday we are asked to be ashamed of honoring it, wanting to live our lives as artists. i’ve carried the shame of being a ‘creative’ since i came to the planet; have been asked to be something different, more, less my whole life. thank spirit, my wisdom is deeper than my shame, and i listened to who i was. i want to say to all the creatives who have been taught to believe who you are is not enough for this world, taught that a life of art will amount to nothing, know that who we are, and what we do is life. when we create, we are creating the world. remember this, and commit.

~ Nayyirah Waheed

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

~ George Eliot

Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape?

~ Lucy Grealy

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.

~ T.s. Eliot

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blasé ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days … the region of pure poetry.

~ Charles Baudelaire

Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, balked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until at last rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Like poetry, fashion does not state anything. It merely suggests

~ Karl Lagerfeld

Art is long, and Time is fleeting.

~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,To raise the genius, and to mend the heart

~ Alexander Pope

Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

At the age of four, you were an artist. And at seven, you were a poet.

~ Seth Godin

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.

~ Julian Barnes