Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.

Claes Oldenburg

Oh, if it be to choose and call thee mine, love, thou art every day my Valentine!

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it... Advanced art today is no longer a cause – it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Harold Rosenberg

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.

Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.

Benjamin Jowett

"Art" is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers…what we call art is a game.

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification — the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

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.

Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind.

The hardest of all the arts to speak of is music, because music has no meaning to speak of

Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius — and I count myself among these — have to restore the lost connection once more. A pure studio art is unfruitful and frail, for anything that does not form living roots — why should it exist at all?

Käthe Kollwitz

Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.

George Edward Woodberry

The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds, and few go beyond them.

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.

Art hurts. Art urges voyages—
and it is easier to stay at home.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Every article on these islands has an almost personal character, which gives this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of medieval life.

John Millington Synge

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts—the book of their deeds, the book of their words, and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others; but of the three, the only quite trustworthy one is the last. The acts of a nation may be triumphant by its good fortune; and its words mighty by the genius of a few of its children: but its art, only by the general gifts and common sympathies of the race.

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.

He that desireth to acquire any art or science seeketh first those means by which that art or science is obtained. If we ought to do so in things natural and earthly, how much more then in spiritual?

All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer — at least the answer for myself. Art is an action against death. It is denial of death.

Jacques Lipchitz

Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

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.

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

Lincoln Steffens

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite — getting something down.