Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

She'll wish there was more, and that's the great art o' letter-writin'.

Charles Dickens

Real orgies are never so exciting as pornographic books. In a volume by Pierre Louys all the girls are young and their figures perfect; there's no hiccoughing or bad breath, no fatigue or boredom, no sudden recollections of unpaid bills or business letters unanswered, to interrupt the raptures. Art gives you the sensation, the thought, the feeling quite pure--chemically pure, I mean,... not morally.

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.

Abraham Lincoln

Architecture approaches nearer than any other art to being irrevocable because it is so difficult to get rid of.

G. K. Chesterton

Works of art are of an infinite solitariness, and nothing is less likely to bring us near to them than criticism. Only love can apprehend and hold them, and can be just towards them.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.

I am much afraid that we shall have very greatly hastened the decline and ruin of the New World by our contagion, and that we willhave sold it our opinions and our arts very dear.

Michel de Montaigne

Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief That thou, her maid, art far more fair than she....

William Shakespeare

Whether or not we can get together, remember well that art lives where absolute freedom is. With all the training thrown to nowhere, with a mind (if there is such a verbal substance) perfectly unaware of its own working, with the self vanishing nowhere, the art of JKD attains its perfection.

It is the fate of most men who mingle with the world, and attain even the prime of life, to make many real friends, and lose them in the course of nature. It is the fate of all authors or chroniclers to create imaginary friends, and lose them in the course of art. Nor is this the full extent of their misfortunes; for they are required to furnish an account of them besides.

Charles Dickens

The sign of a Philistine age is the cry of immorality against art.

O! she's warm.
If this be magic, let it be an art
Lawful as eating.

William Shakespeare

Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realise how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it.

A really well-made buttonhole is the only link between Art and Nature.

True literacy is becoming an arcane art and the nation [United States] is steadily dumbing down.

Some men turn every quality or art into a means of making money; this they conceive to be the end, and to the promotion of the end all things must contribute.

When I contemplate the immense advances in science and discoveries in the arts which have been made within the period of my life, I look forward with confidence to equal advances by the present generation, and have no doubt they will consequently be as much wiser than we have been as we than our fathers were, and they than the burners of witches.

Thomas Jefferson

Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.

Henry David Thoreau

I soon realized that the correct use of propaganda is a true art which has remained practically unknown to the bourgeois parties. Only the Christian- Social movement, especially in Lueger's time achieved a certain virtuosity on this instrument, to which it owed many of its success.

One thing a man must have: either a naturally light disposition or a disposition lightened by art and knowledge.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

O good old man, how well in thee appears The constant service of the antique world, When service sweat for duty, not for meed! Thou art not for the fashion of these times, Where none will sweat but for promotion, And having that do choke their service up Even with the having....

William Shakespeare

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

We tend to think and feel in terms of the art we like; and if the art we like is bad then our thinking and feeling will be bad. And if the thinking and feeling of most of the individuals composing a society is bad, is not that society in danger?

We spend our days, each one of us, in looking for the secret of life. Well, the secret of life is in Art.