Quotes about art

"Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation."

Davis, Angela Y. on art   

"Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us."

Debord, Guy on art   

"Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything."

Delacroix, Eugene on art   

"The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out."

Drummond, John on art   

"Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp."

Dubuffet, Jean on art   

"For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination."

Durrell, Lawrence on art   

"Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?"

Dworkin, Andrea on art   

"The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness."

Eastman, Max on art   

"The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

Eliot, T. S. on art   

"Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same."

Eliot, T. S. on art   

"Every artist writes his own autobiography."

Ellis, Havelock on art   

"The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

"The true poem is the poet's mind."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

"Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

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"New arts destroy the old."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

"Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

"Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

"Art is the path of the creator to his work."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

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"Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

"The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

"Every artist was first an amateur."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

"Artists must be sacrificed to their art."

Emerson, Ralph Waldo on art   

"Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them."

Farnham, Eliza on art   

"An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."

Faulkner, William on art
4 fans of this quote   

"The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass."

Faulkner, William on art   

"In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it."

Fischer, Ernst on art   

"I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art."

Fisher, Carrie on art
3 fans of this quote   

"Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity."

Forster, Edward M. on art   

"In art as in love, instinct is enough."

France, Anatole on art   

"One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear."

French, Marilyn on art   

"Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model."

Frye, Northrop on art   

"Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness."

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y on art   

"Art is either plagiarism or revolution."

Gauguin, Paul on art   

"The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public."

Geldzahler, Henry on art   

"The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity."

Gide, Andre on art   

"Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word."

Gill, Eric on art   

"Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh."

Ginsberg, Allen on art   

"Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self."

Godard, Jean-Luc on art   

"The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality."

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von on art