Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.

Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine,
Whose weakness, married to thy stronger state,
Makes me with thy strength to communicate.

William Shakespeare

It is not strength, but art, obtains the prize, And to be swift is less than to be wise.

The great achievement of science and even of art can be used in one way or another to destroy as well as create; they are only instruments by which men try to do the things they most want to do. If death is desired, science can do that. If a full, rich, and useful life is sought, science can do that also.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity. Now Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic. There is a very wide difference.

Art should cause violence to be set aside and it is only art that can accomplish this.

To move is to stir, and to be valiant is to stand; therefore, if tou art mov'd, thou runst away. (To be angry is to move, to be brave is to stand still. Therefore, if you're angry, you'll run away.)

William Shakespeare

I have heard it said
There is an art which in their piedness shares
With great creating nature.

William Shakespeare

We have built for this world a family mansion, and the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man's struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten.

Henry David Thoreau

Fate wings, with every wish, the afflictive dart,
Each gift of nature, and each grace of art.

SOC:...if arithmetic, mensuration, and weighing be taken away from any art, that which remains will not be much.

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.

It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world, and attain even the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lose them in the course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides.

Charles Dickens

Art and science work in quite different ways: agreed. But, bad as it may sound, I have to admit that I cannot get along as an artist without the use of one or two sciences.... In my view, the great and complicated things that go on in the world cannot be adequately recognized by people who do not use every possible aid to understanding.

The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who have understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,-who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering.

Henry David Thoreau

Be absolute for death; either death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art.

William Shakespeare

In a battle, as in a siege, the art consists in concentrating very heavy fire on a particular point. The line of battle once established, the one who has the ability to concentrate an unlooked for mass of artillery suddenly and unexpectedly on one of these points is sure to carry the day.

Napoleon I of France

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

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

She'll vish there wos more, and that's the great art o' letter writin'.

Charles Dickens

Blow, blow thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.

William Shakespeare

Thou [Virgil] art my master and my author, thou art he from whom alone I took the style whose beauty has done me honor.

Dante Alighieri

The authour who imitates his predecessors only by furnishing himself with thoughts and elegances out of the same general magazine of literature, can with little more propriety be reproached as a plagiary, than the architect can be censured as a mean copier of Angelo or Wren, because he digs his marble out of the same quarry, squares his stones by the same art, and unites them in columns of the same orders.

For where thou art, there is the world itself, With every several pleasure in the world, And where thou art not, desolation.

William Shakespeare