Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

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

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.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

Someone said that Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

John W. Gardner

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.

I am dominated by one thing, an irresistible, burning attraction towards the abstract. The expression of human feelings and the passions of man certainly interest me deeply, but I am less concerned with expressing the motions of the soul and mind than to render visible, so to speak, the inner flashes of intuition which have something divine in their apparent insignificance and reveal magic, even divine horizons, when they are transposed into the marvellous effects of pure plastic art.

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.

Ah, music! What a beautiful art! But what a wretched profession!

Nothing seems to me more doubtful than Aristotle's remark that it is probable the arts and philosophy have several times been discovered and several times lost.

For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

William Butler Yeats

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

Modesty is the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it.

What is called a sincere work [of art] is one that is endowed with enough strength to give reality to an illusion.

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Elizabeth Bishop

I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art –and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.

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.

Alexander Alekhine

I wished to go completely outside and to make a symbolic start for my enterprise of regenerating the life of human kind within the body of society and to prepare a positive future in this context... I can see such a use for the future as representing the really progressive character of the idea of understanding art when it is related to the life of humankind within the social body in the future.

I believe there is little to gain by exchanging opinions with other artists concerning either the ideology of art or technical methods. Very much alone in my work, I am almost jealous of it. Geography has no bearing on it, nor have the interests of the community in which I work.

Art, true art, is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.