Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We, by our arts may be called the grandsons of God.

Leonardo da Vinci

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

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

"Ego," sayest thou, and art proud of that word. But the greater thing - in which thou art unwilling to believe - is thy body with its big sagacity; it saith not "ego," but doeth it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

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

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

The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word "Art," and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L'Age d'Or is O.K.

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.

Sciences and Arts are not cast in a mold, but rather by little and little formed and shaped by often handling and polishing them over; even as bears fashion their young whelps by often licking them.

Michel de Montaigne

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

And the glory of character is in affronting the horrors of depravity to draw thence new nobilities of power: as Art lives and thrills in new use and combining of contrasts, and mining into the dark evermore for blacker pits of night.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

Henry David Thoreau

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

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Excusations, cessions, modesty itself well governed, are but arts of ostentation.

ATHENIAN STRANGER: They say that the greatest and fairest things are the work of nature and of chance, the lesser of art, which, receiving from nature the greater and primeval creations, molds and fashions all those lesser works which are generally termed artificial.

Memento mori and obey the Lord.
Art and religion love the somber chord.

Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation. It is our brain that she quickens to life. Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.

What is abnormal in Life stands in normal relations to Art. It is the only thing in Life that stands in normal relations to Art.

He is the rich man in whom the people are rich, and he is the poor man in whom the people are poor; and how to give access to themasterpieces of art and nature, is the problem of civilization.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part.

Henry David Thoreau

Art is the human process that produces by the way (it is not its only or ultimate object) Secondary Belief.

J. R. R. Tolkien

A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy that they are looking at a real carpenter.

Make some sacrifice for your art and you will be repaid, but ask of art to sacrifice herself for you and a bitter disappointment may come to you.

Cooper's art has some defects. In one place in 'Deerslayer,' and in the restricted space of two-thirds of a page, Cooper has scored 114 offences against literary art out of a possible 115. It breaks the record.