Art Quotes

Art is not an end in itself but a means of addressing humanity.

~ Modest Mussorgsky

All art is a revolt against man's fate.

~ Andri Malraux

Art is a delayed echo.

~ George Santayana

Art is a kind of illness.

~ Giacomo Puccini

One must work nothing but work and one must have patience.

~ Auguste Rodin

Art does not reproduce the visible rather it makes it visible.

~ Paul Klee

The more horrifying this world becomes the more art becomes abstract.

~ Paul Klee

One of the recognizable features of the authentic masterpiece is its capacity to renew itself to endure the loss of some kinds of immediate relevance while still answering the most important questions men can ask including new ones they are just learning how to frame.

~ Arnold Stein

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

~ Pablo Picasso

Art is man's nature nature is God's art.

~ P. J. Bailey

With the pride of the artist you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

~ Norman Mailer

All art is a kind of confession more or less oblique. All artists if they are to survive are forced at last to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.

~ James Baldwin

History repeats itself but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

~ Joseph Conrad

Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story.

~ Maurice Sendak

In any evolutionary process even in the arts the search for novelty becomes corrupting.

~ Kenneth Boulding

The cheap no matter how charming how immediate does not wear so well. It has a way of telling its whole story the first time through.

~ William Littler

A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.

~ Entile Zola

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

~ Pablo Picasso

Art gropes it stalks like a hunter lost in the woods listening to itself and to everything around it unsure of itself waiting to pounce.

~ John W. Gardner

Man in Canadian art is rarely in command of his environment or ever at home in it.

~ Elizabeth Kilbourn

What's an artist but the dregs of his work - the human shambles that follows it around?

~ William Gaddis

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted everything in fact which masks reality from us in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

~ Henri Bergson

Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which throughout his lifetime he draws what he is and what he says and when the source dries up the work withers and crumbles.

~ Albert Camus

As an artist grows older he has to fight disillusionment and learn to establish the same relation to nature as an adult as he had when a child.

~ Charles Burchfield

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nothing can come out of an artist that is not in the man.

~ H. L. Mencken

It is not in life but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

~ George Woodcock

An artist never really finishes his work he merely abandons it.

~ Paul Valéry

I am convinced it is a mistake to find an artist human outside his work. If you cannot find him human in and through his work you are better not to know it when you come to formulate an opinion of his public value.

~ Kenneth Winters

One must work nothing but work and one must have patience.

~ Auguste Rodin

Art does not reproduce the visible rather it makes it visible.

~ Paul Klee

The more horrifying this world becomes the more art becomes abstract.

~ Paul Klee

One of the recognizable features of the authentic masterpiece is its capacity to renew itself to endure the loss of some kinds of immediate relevance while still answering the most important questions men can ask including new ones they are just learning how to frame.

~ Arnold Stein

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

~ Pablo Picasso

Art is man's nature nature is God's art.

~ P. J. Bailey

With the pride of the artist you must blow against the walls of every power that exists the small trumpet of your defiance.

~ Norman Mailer

All art is a kind of confession more or less oblique. All artists if they are to survive are forced at last to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.

~ James Baldwin

History repeats itself but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird.

~ Joseph Conrad

Illustrations have as much to say as the text. The trick is to say the same thing but in a different way. It's no good being an illustrator who is saying a lot that is on his or her mind if it has nothing to do with the text. . . the artist must override the story but he must also override his own ego for the sake of the story.

~ Maurice Sendak

In any evolutionary process even in the arts the search for novelty becomes corrupting.

~ Kenneth Boulding