Art Quotes

Edsel is the artist in our family. Art is something I know nothing about.

~ Henry Ford

The suprematist must have a superior knowledge of understanding. With out that, their art is powerless

~ Luhraw

Ocular infidelity is unfortunately rampant in this so called artist's world.

~ Muse

There is a LOT of bad news every day. The world seems to be getting more and more crazy. So every time you see some bad news, go do something nice for someone or go create something. Write a poem or a song, draw or paint a picture, do something nice for a stranger, even something as simple as complimenting a stranger's outfit or doling out extra smiles during your day. We have to balance out the evil of the world somehow. As artists we are most well equipped to do so!

~ Marcy Ferro

The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know and feel and live, and all the things they don't know, and some of the things they hope, and they are honest about them all and put them on the canvas. What can be more serious?

~ Peter Heller

The terrible things that happen to us,” Tessa said slowly. “What wedo with them...I think that’s what makes us artists.

~ Helen Maryles Shankman

So you have to be humble in dealing with the spaces and make sure they are used according to their unique purpose for which there is no alternative...art, if you like, is really a lack of alternatives.-Jonathan Meese

~ Prestel Publishing

I am not an adventurer by choice but by fate.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Artists shows us what we blind to.

~ Baris Gencel

Some one has defined a work of art as a “thing beautifully done.” I like it better if we cut away the adverb and preserve the word “done,” and let it stand alone in its fullest meaning. Things are not done beautifully. The beauty is an integral part of their being done.

~ Robert Henri

Art does what reality cannot.

~ Jayme K.

I believe art prefers rules. For some artists, the worst thing you can do is say 'Do whatever you want.' Such permission can be terrifying. I know it is for me. Often it's better if you impose rules or restrictions on a project. Requirements can force you to be creative in unusual ways.

~ Lisa Mangum

The first thousand are the hardest.

~ Herbert Gute

Good artists copy, great artists steal.

~ Pablo Picasso

Here's one from me: 'You have to be aware that everyone else is thinking far too hard about themselves to be thinking about you, whoever you are.' If you want it, you can have it. Once you know that, you can be free.

~ Damien Hirst

That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.

~ Amy Reed

With the manipulation of abstract symbols, an artist can send you information without sound, change your feelings and,sometimes, even beliefs. Artists convey the unspeakable. Artists inspire.

~ Jonathan Culver

After the great Impressionists, and again after Van Gogh and Gaugin, people said, 'Painting is now played out.' But Bonnard, Maurice Denis, Roussel and Vuillard appeared and gave them the lie. 'We were wrong,' said the croakers, 'but this at any rate is the end.' Yet to refute them, and to prove that there is no end to art, still another generation of painters sprang up.

~ Ambroise Vollard

It seems shelving is an art, like everything else. I decide to do it exceptionally well.

~ Deborah Meyler

A day is too precious a treasure to forfeit.

~ Eric Samuel Timm

. . . it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn't touch.

~ Donna Tartt

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move.

~ William Faulkner

Allow this poem to carry you beyond yourself, transcending your mortal flesh as you wed yourself with the potentially infinite.

~ Peter Davis

It's okay to keep a broken oven in your yard as long as you call it art.

~ Jenny Lawson

Provided with a case of pencils, and some sheets of paper, I used to take a seat apart from them, near the window, and busy myself in sketching fancy vignettes representing any scene that happened momentarily to shape itself in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of imagination: a glimpse of sea between two rock; the rising moon, and a ship crossing its disc; a group of reeds and water-flags, and a naiad's head, crowned with lotus-flowers, rising out of them; an elf sitting in a hedge-sparrow's nest, under a wreath of hawthorn bloom.

~ Charlotte Brontë

My child has to be an artist,because conceiving her will be the best artmy body has ever accommodated.

~ Nomthandazo Tsembeni

Some seeksolace inwhiskey,I drown mysorrowsin ink.

~ Noor Shirazie

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

~ Henri Poincaré

Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.

~ Antoine Thomson D'abbadie

Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show.

~ Bertrand Russell

The artist has a duty to be calm. He has no right to show his emotion, his involvement, to go pouring it all out at the audience. Any excitement over a subject must be sublimated into an Olympian calm of form. That is the only way in which an artist can tell of the things that excite him.

~ Andrei Tarkovsky

Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?

~ Vladimir Nabokov

O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives.

~ Jim Morrison

The film is the first art form capable of demonstrating how matter plays tricks on man.

~ Walter Benjamin

We would – or at least we should – take upon ourselves the ultimate task of our poet: to seek the face of God.

~ Anthony M. Esolen

As the beautiful does not exist for the artist and poet alone—though these can find in it more poignant depths of meaning than other men—so the world of Reality exists for all; and all may participate in it, unite with it, according to their measure and to the strength and purity of their desire.

~ Evelyn Underhill

I saw a painting once where the artist had actually done that--signed his work in blood. ... When I saw that, I thought it was as if the man who had painted the picture wanted to say to me, Well, you did ask what this actually cost.

~ Neil Bartlett

It might feel like the end of the world--but it's the beginning of your art.

~ David Levithan

If you write literary fiction that’s set partly in the future, you’re apparently a sci-fi writer ... I think of it as being more of a story about what remains after we lose everything and the importance of art in our lives.

~ Emily St. John Mandel

Art exists because reality is neither real nor significant.

~ J.g. Ballard