Quotes about 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.

— John Drummond

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

— Jean Dubuffet

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.

— Lawrence Durrell

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?

— Andrea Dworkin

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

— Max Eastman

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

— T. S. Eliot

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

— T. S. Eliot

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

— Havelock Ellis

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

The true poem is the poet's mind.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

New arts destroy the old.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every artist was first an amateur.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

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.

— Eliza Farnham

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.

— William Faulkner

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.

— William Faulkner

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.

— Ernst Fischer

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

— Carrie Fisher

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.

— Edward M. Forster

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

— Anatole France

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.

— Marilyn French

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

— Northrop Frye

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.

— Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

— Paul Gauguin

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.

— Henry Geldzahler

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

— Andre Gide

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

— Eric Gill

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.

— Allen Ginsberg

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

— Jean-Luc Godard

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

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

— Vincent Van Gogh

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

— Vincent Van Gogh

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

— Edmond and Jules De Goncourt

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

— Edmond and Jules De Goncourt

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

— Nadine Gordimer

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

— Gunther Grass

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

— Vaclav Havel

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

— Benjamin Haydon

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

— David Hockney

A picture is a poem without words.

— Horace

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

— Aldous Huxley

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

— Eugene Ionesco

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

— Max Jacob

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

— Henry James

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

— Ben Johnson

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

— Samuel Johnson

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

— Milla Jovovich

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

— James Joyce

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

— Pauline Kael

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

— John F. Kennedy

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

— John F. Kennedy

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

— John F. Kennedy

Art, that great undogmatized church.

— Ellen Key

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves It's pretty, but is it Art?

— Rudyard Kipling

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

— Paul Klee

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

— Paul Klee

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

— Willem De Kooning

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

— Willem De Kooning

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

— Willem De Kooning

The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.

— Hilton Kramer

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

— Louis Kronenberger

Art is the objectification of feeling.

— Suzanne K. Langer

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

— Lao-Tzu

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

— Sinclair Lewis

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

— Bella Lewitzky

Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude.

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

— Norman Mailer

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

— Henri Matisse

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

— Marshall Mcluhan

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.

— Marshall Mcluhan

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

— Marshall Mcluhan

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

— Robert Menzies

Caricature is rough truth.

— George Meredith

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

— Michelangelo

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

— Henry Miller

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

— Henry Miller

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

— Henry Miller

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

— William Morris

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

— Grandma Moses

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

— Robert Motherwell

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

— Iris Murdoch

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

— George Jean Nathan

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

— Novalis

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

— Novalis

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

— Camille Paglia