Quotes about art

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

— J. G. Ballard

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

— Lester Bangs

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

— Daniel Barenboim

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

— Mikhail Baryshnikov

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

— Jacques Barzun

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

— Charles Baudelaire

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

— Charles Baudelaire

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

— Stephen Bayley

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

— Simone De Beauvoir

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

— Beck

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

— Ludwig Van Beethoven

No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.

— Ludwig Van Beethoven

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

— Saul Bellow

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

— Saul Bellow

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

— Walter Benjamin

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

— John Berger

What is art but a way of seeing?

— Thomas Berger

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

— Adolf Berle

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

— John Berryman

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

— Professor Blackie

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

— Christian Nevell Bovee

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

— Elizabeth Bowen

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

— Constantin Brancusi

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.

— Andre Breton

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?

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning

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

— Duke of Buckingham

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.

— Luis Bunuel

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

— Anthony Burgess

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

— William S. Burroughs

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.

— Samuel Butler

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

— Albert Camus

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.

— Albert Camus

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

— Al Capp

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.

— Angela Carter

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

— Neal Cassady

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

— Willa Cather

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.

— Willa Cather

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

— Paul Cezanne

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.

— Marc Chagall

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.

— Marc Chagall

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.

— Raymond Chandler

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.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

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

— Winston Churchill

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

— Napoleon Bonaparte

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

— John Mason Brown

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

— Albert Camus

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

— E. M. Cioran

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.

— E. M. Cioran

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

— Aleister Crowley

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

— George Eliot

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.

— T. S. Eliot

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

— Indira Gandhi

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.

— Indira Gandhi

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.

— John B. S. Haldane

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

— Nathaniel Howe

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

— Thomas Jefferson

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

— John Keats

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

— Søren Kierkegaard

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

— Bishop Hugh Latimer

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

— Horace Mann

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

— Florence Nightingale

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

— Patrick Henry Pearse

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

— Gabriel Peri

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

— Arthur Schnitzler

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

— Mark Twain

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

— Oscar Wilde

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

— Bill Anderson

No manager ever won no ballgames.

— Sparky Anderson

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

— Vince Lombardi

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

— Jack London

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

— Sir Walter Scott

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

— Dean Smith

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

— Source Unknown

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

— Lord Byron

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

— Desiderius Erasmus

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

— George Gordon

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

— Dorothy Parker

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

— Jean Paul Richter

I am for those who believe in loose delights, I share the midnight orgies of young men, I dance with the dancers and drink with the drinkers.

— Walt Whitman

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

— John Updike

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

— John Ciardi

Art is science made clear.

— Jean Cocteau

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

— Jean Cocteau

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

— Cyril Connolly

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

— Cyril Connolly

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

— Joseph Conrad

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

— Joseph Conrad

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

— Charlotte Saunders Cushman

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

— Edward Dahlberg

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.

— Salvador Dali

It is either easy or impossible.

— Salvador Dali

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

— Salvador Dali

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.

— Angela Y. Davis

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.

— Guy Debord

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

— Eugene Delacroix