Art Quotes

Acceptance and validation are the fuels of the future.

~ Kevin James Breaux

I am so glad that you have never done anything, never carved a statue, or painted a picture, or produced anything outside of yourself! Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets.

~ Oscar Wilde

Let me stop there, but my God, how beautiful Shakespeare is, who else is as mysterious as he is; his language and method are like a brush trembling with excitement and ecstasy. But one must learn to read, just as one must learn to see and learn to live.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

One man thinks justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty and makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has his own way of looking at things; asks himself Which debt must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor? the debt of money or the debt of thought to mankind, of genius to nature? For you, O broker, there is not other principle but arithmetic. For me, commerce is of trivial import; love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are sacred

~ ;Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing more inelegant and ineffective than an art conceived in another art's form.

~ Robert Bresson

Luggage and guests did not travel together ... in fact, luggage went by a different route, so suitcases could be distributed to guest rooms before they arrived

~ Estella M. Chung

Up to four chauffeurs, two secretaries, two personal maids, and a masseur traveled with her to each home

~ Estella M. Chung

All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to truth.

~ Pete Townshend

…I have fallen in love with a painting. Though that phrase doesn’t seem to suffice, not really—rather’s it that I have been drawn into the orbit of a painting, have allowed myself to be pulled into its sphere by casual attraction deepening to something more compelling. I have felt the energy and life of the painting’s will; I have been held there, instructed. And the overall effect, the result of looking and looking into it’s brimming surface as long as I could look, is love, by which I mean a sense of tenderness toward experience, of being held within an intimacy with the things of the world.

~ Mark Doty

Trying to express yourself is more powerful than trying to be the best.

~ Steeven Shaw

He stares at me—taking me in—with his lips slightly parted. I struggle to hold myself in place as we gawk at each other. I want so desperately to run, but something is holding me back, keeping me in place.

~ Ashley Earley

A lot of film people are like that– especially the ones below the line, the blue-collar guys, the grunts. They like putting their hands on the equipment and getting it to do things for them. It's not about art or ideas. It's about working at something and making it come out right.

~ Paul Auster

What is this film (Mirror) about?It is about a Man. No, not the particular man whose voice we hear from behind the screen, played by Innokentiy Smoktunovsky. It's a film about you, your father, your grandfather, about someone who will live after you and who is still you. About a Man who lives on the earth, is a part of the earth and the earth is a part of him, about the fact that a man is answerable for his life both to the past and to the future. You have to watch this film simply, and listen to the music of Bach and the poems of Arseniy Tarkovsky; watch it as one watches the stars, or the sea, as one admires a landscape. There is no mathematical logic here, for it cannot explain what man is or what is the meaning of his life. (Sculpting in Time)

~ Andrey Tarkovsky

The lasting and ultimately most important reputation of a film is not based on reviews, but on what, if anything, people say about it over the years, and on how much affection for it they have.

~ Stanley Kubrick

A director must be a policeman, a midwife, a psychoanalyst, a sycophant and a bastard.

~ Billy Wilder

Kenji Mizoguchi is to the cinema what Bach is to music, Cervantes is to literature, Shakespeare is to theatre, Titian is to painting: the very greatest.

~ Jean Douchet

But I reckon that this realm of higher needs, of something more than just forgetting about everyday life, of mere recreation, this realm of needs has been clearly neglected by us.

~ Krzysztof Kieślowski

Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.

~ François Truffaut

I'm lucky enough to be able to make films and so I don't need a psychiatrist. I can sort out my fears and all those things with my work. That's an enormous privilege. That's the privilege of all artists, to be able to sort out their unhappiness and their neuroses in order to create something.

~ Michael Haneke

Painting, by its nature, cannot provide an object of simultaneous collective reception... as film is able to do today... And while efforts have been made to present paintings to the masses in galleries and salons, this mode of reception gives the masses no means of organizing and regulating their response. Thus, the same public which reacts progressively to a slapstick comedy inevitably displays a backward attitude toward Surrealism.

~ Walter Benjamin

There are no rules. That is how art is born.

~ Helen Frankenthaler

Craft can be practiced by anyone, regardless of the skill or artistry that has come to be demanded by those who preach craft. Like a good meal, a good Crafternoon shouldn't need much - a few quality ingredients, a couple of good friends, and a little bit of creativity.

~ Maura Madden

Crafternoon is about making what you want, how you want it, to the best of your ability. And even if you may not think of yourself as a rock star of creativity, it's there inside you. At Crafternoon, you are a CraftStar.

~ Maura Madden

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

~ Andrei Tarkovsky

What the world thought made little difference. Rembrandt had topaint. Whether he painted well or badly didn't matter; painting was thestuff that held him together as a man. The chief value of art, Vincent, liesin the expression it gives to the artist. Rembrandt fulfilled what he knewto be his life purpose; that justified him. Even if his work had beenworthless, he would have been a thousand times more successful than ifhe had put down his desire and become the richest merchant inAmsterdam. (Mendes Da Costa

~ Irving Stone

Frame everything and some of it will become art.

~ Benny Bellamacina

Art is anything you can get lost in. A place to escape and a place to find yourself.

~ Heloise Clough

An artist simply cannot trust any public emblem of merit.

~ Samuel R. Delany

To come up with one great sentence, one needs to serve a life sentence.

~ Lera Auerbach

Every serious novel is, beyond its immediate thematic preoccupations, a discussion of the craft, a conquest of the form, a conflict with its difficulties and a pursuit of its felicities and beauty.

~ Ralph Ellison

Merlin seeks assistance from Pigwiggen, the only one of Arthur's knights who is also a fairy, and they unite their enchantments to move the British Court to Turkestan. Lively end to Act One.

~ Davies Robertson

(Ars longa vita brevis.) Art is long life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.

~ Lawren Harris

A work of art cannot be satisfied with being a representation it should be a presentation.

~ Jacques Reverdy

An amateur is an artist who supports himself with outside jobs which enable him to paint. A professional is someone whose wife works to enable him to paint.

~ Ben Shahn

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form - or else it is not art.

~ Jacques Barzun

Artistic temperament is a disease that afflicts amateurs.

~ G. K. Chesterton

Artists are the antennae of the race but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust the great artists.

~ Ezra Pound

Artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like bees they must put their lives into the sting they give.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Artists by definition innocent don't steal. But they do borrow without giving back.

~ Ned Rorem

As a painter I shall never signify anything of importance. I feel it absolutely.

~ Vincent Van Gogh