Art Quotes

Classic means standard as opposed to Romantic: form before meaning as opposed to meaning before form. It grows from inside out while Romantic grows from outside in.

~ Ned Rorem

Everything in nature is formed upon the sphere the cone and the cylinder. One must learn to paint these simple figures and then one can do all that he may wish.

~ Paul Cézanne

Fine art is that in which the hand the head and the heart of man go together.

~ John Ruskin

Good artists exist simply in what they make and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in what they are.

~ Oscar Wilde

I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than Die Meister Singer of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.

~ Ralph Vaughan Williams

I wonder whether Art has a higher function than to make me feel appreciate and enjoy natural objects for their art value?

~ Bernard Berenson

I've been 40 years discovering that the Queen of all colours is black.

~ Auguste Renoir

If artists and poets are unhappy it is after all because happiness does not interest them.

~ George Santayana

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.

~ Susan Sontag

One of the most difficult things to do is to paint darkness which nonetheless has light in it.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Painting is a faith and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Rembrandt painted about 700 pictures - of these 3 000 are in existence.

~ Wilhelm Bode

Still there is a calm pure harmony and music inside of me.

~ Vincent Van Gogh

Style like the human body is specially beautiful when the veins are not prominent and the bones cannot be counted.

~ Tacitus

The fingers must be educated the thumb is born knowing.

~ Marc Chagall

The genuine artist is as much a dissatisfied person as the revolutionary yet how diametrically opposed are the products each distills from his dissatisfaction.

~ Eric Hoffer

The object of art is to give life a shape.

~ Jean Anouilh

The scholar seeks the artist finds.

~ André Gide

The song of the brush.

~ Chinese Saying

Theatre takes place all the time wherever one is and art simply facilitates persuading one this is the case.

~ John Cage

Two boys arrived yesterday with a pebble they said was the head of a dog until I pointed out that it was really a typewriter.

~ Pablo Picasso

We live in a rainbow of chaos.

~ Paul Cézanne

We must grant the artist his subject his idea his donnee: Our criticisms apply only to what he makes of it.

~ Henry James

When they asked Michelangelo how he made his statue of David he is reported to have said It is easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn't look like David.

~ Michelangelo

Works of Art are of an infinite loneliness.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Art is I science is we.

~ Claude Bernard

The artist like the God of the creation remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork invisible refined out of existence indifferent paring his fingernails.

~ James Joyce

Designers and free lance artists and editors can set their hourly rates by dividing their annual income needs by 1000.

~ Mike Rider

Children like animals use all their senses to discover the world. Then artists come along and discover it the same way all over again.

~ Eudora Welty

When power leads man toward arrogance poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man's concern poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his experience. When power corrupts poetry cleanses. For art establishes the basic human truths which must serve as the touchstones of our judgement. The artist. . . faithful to his personal vision of reality becomes the last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an offensive state.

~ John F. Kennedy

Art is the expression of an enormous preference.

~ Wyndham Lewis

Conception my boy fundamental brainwork is what makes the difference in all art.

~ Dante Gabriel Rossetti

An artist may visit a museum but only a pedant can live there.

~ George Santayana

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

~ Clement Greenberg

Pioneers did not produce original works of art because they were creating original human environments they did not imagine Utopias because they were shaping them.

~ George Woodcock

Art is a human activity consisting in this that one man consciously by means of external signs hands on to others feelings he has worked through and other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.

~ Leo Tolstoy

A picture lives by companionship. It dies by the same token. It is therefore risky to send it out into the world. How often it must be impaired by the eyes of the unfeeling.

~ Mark Rothko

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious individualistic unconventional sensitive irritable.

~ Robert Motherwell

Culture is something you cannot buy something you cannot import something you cannot learn or produce at will. A writer an artist or musician cannot sit down and say 'Now I will produce culture.' Culture is something that evolves out of the simple enduring elements of everyday life elements most truthfully expressed in the folk arts and crafts of a nation.

~ Thor Hansen

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

~ Ted Shawn