Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new.

Gregory Bateson

Custom that is before all law, Nature that is above all art.

There are no contests in the Art of Peace. A true warrior is invincible because he or she contests with nothing. Defeat means to defeat the mind of contention that we harbor within.

Morihei Ueshiba

Fortunately art is a community effort – a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

And really the purpose of art - for me, fiction - is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have.

Jerzy Kosiński

With Dada I … have in common a certain mistrust toward power. We don't like authority, we don't like power, To me art is a form of manifest revolt, total and complete. It's a political attitude which doesn't need to found a political party. It's not a matter of taking power; when you are against it, you can't take it. We're against all forms of force which aggregate and crystallize an authority that oppresses people. Obviously this is not a characteristic of my art alon-it's much more general, a basic political attitude. It's a clear intention, more necessary today than ever, to oppose all forms of force emanating from a managing, centralising political power.

They say princes learn no art truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as his groom.

In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.

We think only through the medium of words. Languages are true analytical methods. Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method. The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged.

Antoine Lavoisier

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.

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

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Benjamin Haydon

Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.

Now life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for the training of a mere beginner.

The secret story is the one we'll never know, although we're living it from day to day, thinking we're alive, thinking we've got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn't matter. But every single damn thing matters! Only we don't realize. We just tell ourselves that art runs on one track and life, our lives, on another, and we don't realize that's a lie.

Roberto Bolaño

The main thing now is not to paint precociously but to be, or at least become, an individual. The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

A great department store, easily reached, open at all hours, is more like a good museum of art than any of the museums we have yet established.

John Cotton Dana

As is the case in all branches of art, success depends in a very large measure upon individual initiative and exertion, and cannot be achieved except by dint of hard work.

Art has to move you and design does not, unless it's a good design for a bus.

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world… …The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.