Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The power of works of art still continues to be secretly nourished by imitation... kitsch

Theodor W. Adorno

Just as one must learn the art of killing in the training for violence, so one must learn the art of dying in the training for nonviolence.

Aristotle can be regarded as the father of logic. But his logic is too scholastic, full of subtleties, and fundamentally has not been of much value to the human understanding. It is a dialectic and an organon for the art of disputation.

True science investigates and brings to human perception such truths and such knowledge as the people of a given time and society consider most important. Art transmits these truths from the region of perception to the region of emotion.

If you would learn to write, it is in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts, you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer's home. A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The art of conversation, or the qualifications for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go, with a respect for the emergencies of the moment.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.

A man must be clothed with society, or we shall feel a certain bareness and poverty, as of a displaced and unfurnished member. He is to be dressed in arts and institutions, as well as in body garments. Now and then a man exquisitely made can live alone, and must; but coop up most men and you undo them.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since philosophy is the art which teaches us how to live, and since children need to learn it as much as we do at other ages, why do we not instruct them in it?.. But in truth I know nothing about the philosophy of education except this: that the greatest and the most important difficulty known to human learning seems to lie in that area which treats how to bring up children and how to educate them.

Michel de Montaigne

Thou hast nor youth nor age;
But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,
Dreaming on both; for all thy blessed youth Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms Of palsied eld; and when thou art old and rich, Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty, To make thy riches pleasant.

William Shakespeare

The secret of genius is to suffer no fiction to exist for us; to realize all that we know; in the high refinement of modern life,in arts, in sciences, in books, in men, to exact good faith, reality, and a purpose; and first, last, midst, and without end, to honor every truth by use.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life isn't a support-system for art. It's the other way around.

Film will only become an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.

I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate.

New arts are long in the world before poets describe them; for they borrow everything from their predecessors, and commonly derive very little from nature or from life.

An epithet or metaphor drawn from nature ennobles art; an epithet or metaphor drawn from art degrades nature.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.

And then, I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?

Vincent van Gogh

Sovereigns always see with pleasure a taste for the arts of amusement and superfluity, which do not result in the exportation of bullion, increase among their subjects. They very well know that, besides nourishing that littleness of mind which is proper to slavery, the increase of artificial wants only binds so many more chains upon the people.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

How beautiful to have the church always open, so that every tired wayfaring man may come in and be soothed by all that art can suggest of a better world when he is weary with this.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Nobody is made anything by hearing of rules, or laying them up in his memory; practice must settle the habit of doing, without reflecting on the rule; and you may as well hope to make a good painter, or musician, extempore, by a lecture and instruction in the arts of music and painting, as a coherent thinker, or a strict reasoner, by a set of rules, showing him wherein right reasoning consists.

Good-bye, proud world! I'm going home:
Thou art not my friend, and I'm not thine.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It never was in the power of any man or any community to call the arts into being. They come to serve his actual wants, never to please his fancy.

Ralph Waldo Emerson