Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

No one should ever work.
Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost all the evil you'd care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.
That doesn't mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By "play" I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child's play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn't passive.

But since the world, which thou art to strive against, is not without thee, but within thee, it follows, that it is also to be conquered not without, but within thee.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

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.

The art of being taught is the art of discovery, as the art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery to take place

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate hut at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form—or else it is not art.

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

William Butler Yeats

Words may be false and full of art,
Sighs are the natural language of the heart.

Thomas Shadwell

Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.

To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the most pleasant sensations in the world. You are surrounded by adventure. You have no idea what is in store for you, but you will, if you are wise and know the art of travel, let yourself go on the stream of the unknown and accept whatever comes in the spirit in which the gods may offer it.

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.

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

Nature generally struggles against this treatment for a while, until her powers seem in a great measure exhausted, when she quietly yields to the power of the art.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

Alfred North Whitehead

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.

My entrance into the field of abstract art came about as the result of a visit to the studio of Piet Mondrian in Paris in 1930.
I was particularly impressed by some rectangles of color he had tacked on his wall in a pattern after his nature.
I told him I would like to make them oscillate he objected. I went home and tried to paint abstractly-but in two weeks I was back again among plastic materials.
I think that at that time and practically ever since, the underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from.

Alexander Calder

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

There are periods in history when change is necessary, and other periods when it is better to keep everything for the time as it is. The art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

The art of medicine was to be properly learned only from its practice and its exercise.

Thomas Sydenham

And, moreover, it is art in its most general and comprehensive form that is here discussed, for the dialogue embraces everything connected with it, from its greatest object, the state, to its least, the embellishment of sensuous existence.

Friedrich Schleiermacher