Quotes about art

Art is a form of catharsis.

— Dorothy Parker

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

— Octavio Paz

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

— Francis Picabia

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

— Pablo Picasso

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

— Pablo Picasso

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

— Pablo Picasso

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

— Pablo Picasso

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

— Pablo Picasso

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

— Pablo Picasso

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

— Pablo Picasso

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

— Edgar Allan Poe

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

— Alexander Pope

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

— Ezra Pound

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

— Ezra Pound

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

— Ezra Pound

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

— Marcel Proust

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

— Edgar Quinet

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

— Ayn Rand

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

— Ad Reinhardt

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

— Pierre Auguste Renoir

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

— Adrienne Rich

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

— Laura Riding

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

— Auguste Rodin

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

— Harold Rosenberg

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

— Harold Rosenberg

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

— Jalal-Uddin Rumi

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

— Salman Rushdie

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

— John Ruskin

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

— John Ruskin

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

— John Ruskin

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

— George Sand

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

— George Santayana

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

— Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

— Robert Schumann

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

— Robert Schumann

All art is an imitation of nature.

— Seneca

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

— William Shakespeare

O, had I but followed the arts!

— William Shakespeare

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

— George Bernard Shaw

Art is the signature of civilizations.

— Beverly Sills

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

— Logan Pearsall Smith

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

— Susan Sontag

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

— Gertrude Stein

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

— Rabindranath Tagore

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

— James Thurber

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

— Count Leo Tolstoy

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

— Lionel Trilling

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

— Alexander Trocchi

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

— Leon Trotsky

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

— Harry S Truman

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

— Kenneth Tynan

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

— Tristan Tzara

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

— Source Unknown

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

— Source Unknown

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

— Source Unknown

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

— Source Unknown

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

— Source Unknown

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

— John Updike

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

— Edward Varese

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

— Andrei Voznesensky

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

— Andy Warhol

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

— Evelyn Waugh

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

— Simone Weil

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

— Rebecca West

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

— Alfred North Whitehead

In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

— Oscar Wilde

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

— Oscar Wilde

No great artist ever sees things as they really are, if he did he would cease to be an artist.

— Oscar Wilde

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

— Oscar Wilde

Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

— Oscar Wilde

All art is quite useless.

— Oscar Wilde

Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.

— Oscar Wilde

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

— Robert Wilson

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

— Winkelmann

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

— Thomas Wolfe

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

— Thomas Wolfe

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

— George E. Woodberry

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

— William Wordsworth

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

— Frank Lloyd Wright

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

— Yu Cao

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

— Mao Zedong

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

— Emile Zola

So wie die Verruecktheit in einem hoeheren Sinn, der Anfang aller Weisheit ist, so ist die Schizophrenie der Anfang aller Kunst, aller Phantasie. (As insanity in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizophrenia the beginning of all art, all fantasy.)

— Hermann Hesse

This is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster.

— Janet Fitch

Possibly the worst break up line ever: it's not me, it's you.

— Anonymous

Ik denk dat de emoties en percepties waar ik toegang tot heb als een zwart iemand en als een vrouwelijk iemand, ruimer zijn dan iemand die geen van beide is... Dus lijkt het me dat dit gegeven m'n leefwereld niet verkleind heeft als zwarte, vrouwelijke schrijver. Dit maakte m'n leefwereld alleen maar groter.

— Toni Morrison

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

— Pablo Picasso

Things happen for a reason. Moods change from days to seasons, If anything instead of pleasing them, please yourself & just leave'em

— Authentic James

A true artist looks at lyrics, pictures, stories, and paintings like a breath of fresh air.

— BPBEE

My inspiration is Art....Because without Art we would just be stuck with reality... By Daniel R. Lynch

— Daniel R. Lynch

YOU WILL ONLY BECOME WHAT YOU ARE BECOMING RIGHT NOW. Though you cannot go back and make a brand new start, my friend, anyone can start from now and make a brand new end.

— John C. Maxwell

Artillery adds dignity to what would otherwise be a vulgar brawl.

— Frederick The Great

Patience is an art.

— Tadj Abelkader

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

— Dejan Stojanovic

There is no competition of sounds between a nightingale and a violin.

— Dejan Stojanovic

Art is apotheosis; often, the complaint of beauty.

— Dejan Stojanovic

Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art—a euphemism—tamed wilderness.

— Dejan Stojanovic