Art Quotes

Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make the attempt. That's morality, that's religion, that's art, that's life.

~ Phil Ochs

Religion is the everlasting dialogue between humanity and God. Art is its soliloquy.

~ Franz Werfel

I would no more quarrel with a man because of his religion than I would because of his art.

~ Mary Baker Eddy

I didn't want to be like everybody else. Art was my religion.

~ Julian Schnabel

The passion for art is, as for believers, very religious. It unites people, its message is of common humanity. Art has become my religion - others pray in church. It's a banality, but you don't possess art, it possesses you. It's like falling in love.

~ Francois Pinault

I select a very small number of things to be sceptical about, such as markets, and on these I am hypersceptic. But I want to be fooled by randomness in art. I want the ceremonial of religion; we are made for it.

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.

~ Huston Smith

Art, like religion, arises from the spirit, but alas, the formalizing of spiritual life all too often ends in hypocrisy.

~ Michael Leunig

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.

~ Edmund Burke

Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature.

~ John Burroughs

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

~ Honoré De Balzac

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

~ Honoré De Balzac

I think if you say that art and politics, or religion and politics, mustn't mix, don't mix, that is itself a political statement. Even if you are writing a 19th-century novel where the money comes from a plantation in the Caribbean and you don't talk about that, that itself is a political thing.

~ Mohsin Hamid

Intolerance respecting other people's religion is toleration itself in comparison with intolerance respecting other people's art.

~ Wallace Stevens

How do you live with evil? Art is traditionally - certainly with my secular background - the answer, but art is very self-referential, whereas religion claims to go beyond the bounds of human existence.

~ Yann Martel

Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light.

~ Franz Liszt

All along we find that social life - religion, politics, art - reflects the stages reached in the development of the knowledge of self; it shows the social uses made of this knowledge.

~ James Mark Baldwin

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

~ Dorothea Lange

The demons you have are what motivate you to make your art. This is what drives the detective, this is what drives the painter, this is what drives the writer: a conflicting urge to forget pain and at the same time remember it and fight for some kind of justice. I know these powerful things are inside of me and everyone in some way or another.

~ Tom Reiss

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

~ Debi Gliori

There's nothing more superficial to do than to paint a beautiful woman. The most beautiful portraits in art were of ugly women. If you paint Brigitte Bardot, it's a disaster. Sunsets, you have to stay away from sunsets. You paint a sunset, you are in great danger.

~ Fernando Botero

To me, my brand is luxury, it's art, it's women, it's raw, it's urban.

~ Theophilus London

Women are our most miraculous muse, an enchanted intangibility that encourages all art.

~ Ceelo Green

A Bachelor of Arts is one who makes love to a lot of women, and yet has the art to remain a bachelor.

~ Helen Rowland

A nice blend of prediction and surprise seem to be at the heart of the best art.

~ Wendy Carlos

Our best teachers do more than impart facts and figures - they inspire and encourage students and instill a true desire to learn. That's a fine art in itself.

~ Sonny Perdue

The best art is realized when you can share the experience of making of it and not just the presentation of it, so that the audience is part of the creation and not just part of the consumption. Then it becomes much more full-bodied and robust.

~ Ava Duvernay

Some people have been kind enough to call me a fine artist. I've always called myself an illustrator. I'm not sure what the difference is. All I know is that whatever type of work I do, I try to give it my very best. Art has been my life.

~ Norman Rockwell

In order to figure this artmaking stuff out, it's trial and error and experimentation, and takes some time and hard thinking. Putting work out in many forms and stages is an extension of how I see things. I feel the art process is best served when it invites comments and constructive criticism from people.

~ Jim Goldberg

Be true to yourself, help others, make each day your masterpiece, make friendship a fine art, drink deeply from good books - especially the Bible, build a shelter against a rainy day, give thanks for your blessings and pray for guidance every day.

~ John Wooden

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

~ Salvador Dalí

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

~ Jackson Pollock

Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day.

~ John Wooden

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

~ Henri Matisse

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

~ Francis Bacon

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness; but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution. Employ it, and thou art wise; be wise and thou art happy.

~ Akhenaton

History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created.

~ William Morris

I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.

~ Judy Chicago

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

~ Golda Meir

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

~ Joseph Conrad