Art Quotes

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

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

~ Marshall Mcluhan

It is well with me only when I have a chisel in my hand.

~ Michelangelo

Art is based on order. The world is full of 'sloppy Bohemians' and their work betrays them.

~ Eduard Weston

Living is a form of not being sure not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong but we take leap after leap in the dark.

~ Agnes De Mille

The artist like the idiot or clown sits on the edge of the world and a push may send him over it.

~ Osbert Sitwell

Art-speech is the only truth. An artist is usually a damned liar but his art if it be art will tell you the truth of his day. And that is all that matters. Away with eternal truth. The truth lives from day to day and the marvelous Plato of yesterday is chiefly bosh today.

~ D. H. Lawrence

Art isn't something you marry it's something you rape.

~ Edgar Degas

It's not what you see that is art art is the gap.

~ Marcel Duchamp

I always suspect an artist who is successful before he is dead.

~ John Murray Gibbon

An artist has to take life as he finds it. Life by itself is formless wherever it is. Art must give it form.

~ Hugh Maclennan

Art upsets science reassures.

~ Georges Braque

An artist has been defined as a neurotic who continually cures himself with his art.

~ Lee Simonson

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

~ Paul Gauguin

The father of every good work is discontent and its mother is diligence.

~ Lajos Kassak

A work should contain its total meaning within itself and should impress it on the spectator before he even knows the subject.

~ Henri Matisse

The terror of art lies in the representation of the hidden reality with its shattering effect.

~ Martin Greenburg

Drawing is speaking to the eye talking is painting to the ear.

~ Joseph Joubert

We should comport ourselves with the masterpieces of art as with exalted personages - stand quietly before them and wait till they speak to us.

~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois so that you may be violent and original in your work.

~ Gustave Flaubert

The painting rises from the brushstrokes as a poem rises from the words. The meaning comes later.

~ Joan Miró

Caricature is rough truth.

~ George Meredith

A work of art is an exaggeration.

~ André Gide

Art not only imitates nature but also completes its deficiencies.

~ Aristotle

When one admires an artist it is important not to know him personally.

~ Jacinto Benaventey Martinez

You couldn't make up something that looked so right.

~ Chris Howard

Gloria was still talking, something about how shooting people was in a sense safer than making art, in terms of avoiding serious lapses in taste.

~ Rachel Kushner

Art, like Nature, has her monsters

~ Oscar Wilde

I don't get it. I just don't get it. If Art is supposed to imitate Life, why do they want all the actors to be thin? There are fat people in the world. Shouldn't there be a few of us actors to represent them?

~ Camryn Manheim

While working in California, I met William Valentiner and Edgar Richardson of the Detroit Institute of Arts. I mentioned a desire which I had to paint a series of murals about the industries of the United States, a series that would constitute a new kind of plastic poem, depicting in color and form the story of each industry and its division of labor. Dr. Valentiner was keenly interested, considering my idea a potential base for a new school of modern art in America, as related to the social structure of American life as the art of the Middle Ages had been related to medieval society.

~ Diego Rivera

Picasso created blank spaces through which an imagination could fly.

~ Peggy Kopman-Owens

When he craved contact, he stopped in to visit the Cézannes and Monets at the Musée du Luxembourg, believing they had already done what he was striving for—distilling places and people and objects to their essential qualities.

~ Paula Mclain

If you were to go, and hopefully someday you will, you would see a lot of paintings of dead people. You'd see Jesus on the cross, and you'd see a dude getting stabbed in the neck, and you'd see people dying at sea and in battle and a parade of martyrs. But Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid. Nobody biting it from the plague or smallpox or yellow fever or whatever, because there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of.

~ John Green

But I feel vanity is a part of art and the non-vain are really non-artistic.

~ Barry Webster

In 1946 there was no money in art, no dealer galleries, no craft shops. After the war we started to teach art in every school for the first time. Our generation played a crucial role. We were the stepping stones towards today's galleries.

~ Theresa Sjoquist

The meat market itself was probably a greater influence on Spare than his first school. It offered a spectacle of thousands of animal carcasses, which arrived under the market by a specially built railway before being displayed and disposed of at ground level.

~ Phil Baker

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

~ Andy Warhol

To thrive, all businesses must focus on the art of self-disruption. Rather than wait for the competition to steal your business, every founder and employee needs to be willing to cannibalize their existing revenue streams in order to create new ones. All disruption starts with introspection.

~ Jay Samit

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

~ Andy Warhol

The show business has all phases and grades of dignity, from the exhibition of a monkey to the exposition of that highest art in music or the drama which secures for the gifted artists a world-wide fame princes well might envy.

~ P. T. Barnum