Quotes on Art

Building art is a synthesis of life in materialised form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together.

Author: Alvar Aalto

Your talent is your art. It is not to be taken for granted.

Author: Paula Abdul

By the general process of epic poetry, I mean the way this form of art has constantly responded to the profound needs of the society in which it was made.

Author: Lascelles Abercrombie

No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.

Author: Lascelles Abercrombie

Life is a canvas waiting to be painted with the vibrant colors of your dreams.

Author: Sophia Rivera

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

Author: Chinua Achebe

If we learn the art of yielding what must be yielded to the changing present, we can save the best of the past.

Author: Dean Acheson

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

Author: Ansel Adams

There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define; we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.

Author: Ansel Adams

I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.

Author: Henry Adams

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Author: Scott Adams

Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary.

Author: Will Adams

The art of politics consists in knowing precisely when it is necessary to hit an opponent slightly below the belt.

Author: Konrad Adenauer

The educator must believe in the potential power of his pupil, and he must employ all his art in seeking to bring his pupil to experience this power.

Author: Alfred Adler

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.

Author: Stella Adler

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

Author: Theodor Adorno

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Author: Theodor Adorno

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

Author: Theodor Adorno

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

Author: Theodor Adorno

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Author: Theodor Adorno

I love doing normal things - movies, shopping, going out with friends, writing, reading, taking hot bubble baths - that's a big one for relaxation. I also love to go to art and history museums.

Author: Christina Aguilera

There was certainly less profanity in the Godfather than in the Sopranos. There was a kind of respect. It's not that I totally agreed with it, but it was a great piece of art.

Author: Danny Aiello

This art of acting is a process I love very much. It's an unbelievably fulfilling experience for me and I look forward to building upon my art in the years to come.

Author: Greg Akcelrod

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness; but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution. Employ it, and thou art wise; be wise and thou art happy.

Author: Akhenaton

I hope we can keep doing it this way - making music and art that are pure products of our influences while not really having to let the whole celebrity side of it get in the way. Then maybe more virtual bands will come out and do the same thing.

Author: Damon Albarn

More and more, cultural groups are cross-pollinating, and we're getting much more interesting art as a result.

Author: Damon Albarn

Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see.

Author: Josef Albers

I was at the Royal Art School. That was a preparatory school specially for art teachers. You see, it was not so much for the development of artists. But we had there terribly stiff training.

Author: Josef Albers

In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.

Author: Josef Albers

It is not so for art in appreciation because art is concerned with human behavior. And science is concerned with the behavior of metal or energy. It depends on what the fashion is. Now today it's energy. It's the same soul behind it. The same soul, you see.

Author: Josef Albers

Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward.

Author: Josef Albers

True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.

Author: Thomas Aldrich

Chess for me is not a game, but an art. Yes, and I take upon myself all those responsibilities which an art imposes on its adherents.

Author: Alexander Alekhine

It would be difficult, in this day and age, to fund art that made racial slurs.

Author: Jane Alexander

All I want to do is make sure that art is available to all Americans in a participatory way, whether you engage in the art process yourself or you're an audience member.

Author: Jane Alexander

Senator Helms might very well do that. I would point out to him that we in the art world are not necessarily in the business of making controversial art.

Author: Jane Alexander

No one's conception of art is going to be acceptable to everybody.

Author: Jane Alexander

All art is exploitation.

Author: Sherman Alexie

All I owe the world is my art.

Author: Sherman Alexie

Thus the castle of each feudal chieftain became a school of chivalry, into which any noble youth, whose parents were from poverty unable to educate him to the art of war, was readily received.

Author: Horatio Alger

Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild.

Author: Dante Alighieri

Nature is the art of God.

Author: Dante Alighieri

At that time, the academic orientation was rather technical contrary to that of the university, where art theory is very important. The teachers were renowned artists and among the best of that time.

Author: Ralph Allen

Never judge a work of art by its defects.

Author: Washington Allston

Life is a canvas of endless possibilities, paint boldly and without fear of imperfection.

Author: Gabrielle Thompson

Let us be true: this is the highest maxim of art and of life, the secret of eloquence and of virtue, and of all moral authority.

Author: Henri Amiel

To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song.

Author: Henri Amiel

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

Author: Martin Amis

We met with the poet Frank O'Hara, who was a link between Upper and Lower Bohemia, and who worked at the Museum of Modern Art, where we had hoped to do the readings.

Author: David Amram

The Upper Bohemia people wore tuxedos in an art gallery, and Lower Bohemia was all of us.

Author: David Amram

I wish to share and pass down some of my generation's traits, and encourage young people to create their own art, music, and literature.

Author: David Amram

If you respect the art and you have some talent about you, I'm on your team.

Author: Anthony Anderson

Performance art is about joy, about making something that's so full of kind of a wild joy that you really can't put into words.

Author: Laurie Anderson

Writers want to summarize: What does this mean? What did we learn from this? That's a very 19th-century way of thinking about art, because it assumes that it should make our lives better or teach us something.

Author: Laurie Anderson

At the School of Visual Arts in New York, you can get your degree in Net art, which is really a fantastic way of thinking of theater in new ways.

Author: Laurie Anderson

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Author: Lindsay Anderson

If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right.

Author: Maxwell Anderson

I mean, art for art's sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one's needs.

Author: Carl Andre

My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.

Author: Carl Andre

My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.

Author: Carl Andre

Today's cinema is a global art form, it is impossible to make movies for a market the size of France, representing no more than 4% of the world's total.

Author: Jean-Jacques Annaud

The art of motion pictures is pictorial and language comes a distant second.

Author: Jean-Jacques Annaud

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some.

Author: Jean Anouilh

The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is to things made by his art.

Author: Thomas Aquinas

I've loved art for more than 30 years.

Author: Jeffrey Archer

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Author: Aristophanes

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

Author: Aristotle

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

Author: Aristotle

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Author: Aristotle

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

Author: Aristotle

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Author: Aristotle

Homer has taught all other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

Author: Aristotle

I'd love to go to art school. I'd love to learn how to draw. I'd love to be fluent in Spanish. I'd like to be a brain surgeon.

Author: Billie Armstrong

There are some forms of religion that are bad, just as there's bad cooking or bad art or bad sex, you have bad religion too.

Author: Karen Armstrong

But since the world, which thou art to strive against, is not without thee, but within thee, it follows, that it is also to be conquered not without, but within thee.

Author: Johann Arndt

Variety is more than a means of avoiding boredom, since art is more than an entertainment of the senses.

Author: Rudolf Arnheim

Man's striving for order, of which art is but one manifestation, derives from a similar universal tendency throughout the organic world; it is also paralleled by, and perhaps derived from, the striving towards the state of simplest structure in physical systems.

Author: Rudolf Arnheim

Good art theory must smell of the studio, although its language should differ from the household talk of painters and sculptors.

Author: Rudolf Arnheim

The arts, as a reflection of human existence at its highest, have always and spontaneously lived up to this demand of plenitude. No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple.

Author: Rudolf Arnheim

I've always wanted to introduce hip-hop filmmaking to film. There's hip-hop art, dance, music, but there really isn't hip-hop film. So I was trying to do that.

Author: Darren Aronofsky

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Author: Jean Arp

It's so hard to be a mother and to also want to practice your art.

Author: Rosanna Arquette

Art is such an important part of our culture.

Author: Rosanna Arquette

Criticism really used to hurt me. Most of these critics are usually frustrated artists, and they criticise other people's art because they can't do it themselves. It's a really disgusting job. They must feel horrible inside.

Author: Rosanna Arquette

1988 I also received from the city of Vienna the cross of honour for art and science. These titles and the various honors mean a great deal to me, most of all for the reason that they would mean a great deal to my parents too.

Author: Leon Askin

A nation devoid of art and artists cannot have a full existence.

Author: Kemal Ataturk

What I am sad about is that there is now, in America, no equivalent to the art circuit.

Author: Richard Attenborough

I've always loved movies, art and clothes.

Author: Colleen Atwood

Popular art is the dream of society; it does not examine itself.

Author: Margaret Atwood

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

Author: W. Auden

A verbal art like poetry is reflective; it stops to think. Music is immediate, it goes on to become.

Author: W. Auden

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Author: W. Auden

Art is born of humiliation.

Author: W. Auden

All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.

Author: W. Auden

'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'

Author: W. Auden

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Author: W. Auden

It's a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Author: W. Auden

To have been torn from the study would have been as death; my time was entirely occupied with art.

Author: John Audubon

Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full, that thou mayest be filled with that whereof thou art empty.

Author: Saint Augustine

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

Author: Marcus Aurelius

When thou art above measure angry, bethink thee how momentary is man's life.

Author: Marcus Aurelius

I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.

Author: Richard Avedon

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

Author: Francis Bacon

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

Author: Francis Bacon

Technique! The very word is like a shriek of outraged Art. It is the idiot name given to effort by those who are too weak, too weary, or too dull to play the game. The mighty have no theory of technique.

Author: Leonard Bacon

I love putting the music together. It's like art.

Author: Erykah Badu

Anything that had to do with art I been doing all my life. It was a gift. It's nothing I work real hard at doing.

Author: Erykah Badu

I'm free. I just do what I want, say what I want, say how I feel, and I don't try to hurt nobody. I just try to make sure that I don't compromise my art in any kind of way, and I think people respect that.

Author: Erykah Badu

The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

Author: Walter Bagehot

The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name.

Author: Enid Bagnold

Art is man's nature; nature is God's art.

Author: Philip Bailey

Simplicity is natures first step, and the last of art.

Author: Philip Bailey

We have long possessed the art of war and the science of war, which have been evolved in the minutest detail.

Author: Fredrik Bajer

Animation is tremendously resilient. Animation will recover, as art always recovers. There's always cycles of good art.

Author: Ralph Bakshi

Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I'm a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.

Author: Ralph Bakshi

All along we find that social life - religion, politics, art - reflects the stages reached in the development of the knowledge of self; it shows the social uses made of this knowledge.

Author: James Baldwin

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Author: Arthur Balfour

I refuse to confide and don't like it when people write about art.

Author: Balthus

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

Author: Honore Balzac

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

Author: Honore Balzac

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

Author: Honore Balzac

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

Author: Lester Bangs

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

Author: Lester Bangs

Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.

Author: Amiri Baraka

He that desireth to acquire any art or science seeketh first those means by which that art or science is obtained. If we ought to do so in things natural and earthly, how much more then in spiritual?

Author: Robert Barclay

Now, there are so many movies, so many festivals, and so many awards going on, each judged with each other, like your work is worse than others and that's not fair. How can you tell what's best and what's worst from these awards? We're talking about art.

Author: Javier Bardem

But don't call me an actor. I'm just a worker. I am an entertainer. Don't say that what I am doing is art.

Author: Javier Bardem

An interesting thing happened in 1989, right as I was graduating: the stock market crashed and really changed the landscape of the art world in New York. It made the kind of work I was doing interesting to galleries that wouldn't have normally been interested in it.

Author: Matthew Barney

It was Public Art, defined as art that is purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.

Author: Dave Barry

In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

Author: Bela Bartok

The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles.

Author: Bernard Baruch

I think art education, especially in this country, which government pretty much ignores, is so important for young people.

Author: Mikhail Baryshnikov

People of art should never get married and have children, because it's a selfish experience.

Author: Mikhail Baryshnikov

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.

Author: Jacques Barzun

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.

Author: Jacques Barzun

Unlike the expressionists, I have never been interested in renewing the world through the vehicle of art.

Author: Georg Baselitz

Art is man's distinctly human way of fighting death.

Author: Leonard Baskin

The art schools... you get young kids doing the most vile and meaningless crap. I think they believe every bit of it.

Author: Leonard Baskin

Of course, I did lots of what would be called graphic design now, what used to be called commercial art.

Author: Leonard Baskin

Works of art produced in the contemporary world are a further expression of that. But I don't think there is an active, ongoing nihilist self-consciousness in the artist.

Author: Leonard Baskin

Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.

Author: Leonard Baskin

I don't listen to what art critics say. I don't know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

Author: Jean-Michel Basquiat

I don't think about art when I'm working. I try to think about life.

Author: Jean-Michel Basquiat

There's a battle between what the cook thinks is high art and what the customer just wants to eat.

Author: Mario Batali

Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions.

Author: Gregory Bateson

The question is not... if art is enough to fulfill my life, but if I am true to the path I have set for myself, if I am the best I can be in the things I do. Am I living up to the reasons I became a singer in the first place?

Author: Kathleen Battle

Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.

Author: Charles Baudelaire

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

Author: Charles Baudelaire

What is art? Prostitution.

Author: Charles Baudelaire

Who would dare assign to art the sterile function of imitating nature?

Author: Charles Baudelaire