Quotes about art

"The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person."

Blackie, Professor on art   

"The great artist is a slave to his ideals."

Bovee, Christian Nevell on art   

"Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting."

Bowen, Elizabeth on art   

"The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible."

Brancusi, Constantin on art   

"The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal."

Breton, Andre on art   

"What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?"

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett on art   

"Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well."

Buckingham, Duke of on art   

"In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important."

Bunuel, Luis on art   

"Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it."

Burgess, Anthony on art   

"Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact."

Burroughs, William S. on art
4 fans of this quote   

"The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it."

Butler, Samuel on art   

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"To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art."

Camus, Albert on art   

"It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore."

Camus, Albert on art   

"Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered."

Capp, Al on art   

"Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art."

Carter, Angela on art   

"Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other."

Cassady, Neal on art   

"Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers."

Cather, Willa on art   

"Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is."

Cather, Willa on art   

"With an apple I will astonish Paris."

Cezanne, Paul on art   

"When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art."

Chagall, Marc on art   

"When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art."

Chagall, Marc on art   

"The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture."

Chandler, Raymond on art   

"The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on art   

"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on art   

"Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on art   

"The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep."

Chesterton, Gilbert K. on art   

"Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse."

Churchill, Winston on art
7 fans of this quote   

"It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr."

Bonaparte, Napoleon on art
3 fans of this quote   

"I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way."

Brown, John Mason on art   

"Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never."

Camus, Albert on art   

"Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off."

Cioran, E. M. on art
3 fans of this quote   

"No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it."

Cioran, E. M. on art   

"The people who have really made history are the martyrs."

Crowley, Aleister on art   

"Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution."

Eliot, George on art   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now, by suffering. This is the easier victory."

Eliot, T. S. on art   

"The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

"The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

"Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning."

Gandhi, Indira on art   

"Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic."

Gandhi, Indira on art   

"While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced."

Haldane, John B. S. on art