Art Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

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

John Kenneth Galbraith

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

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.

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

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

Honoré de Balzac

It has been my fate in a long life of production to be credited chiefly with the equivocal virtue of industry, a quality so excellent in morals, so little satisfactory in art.

Margaret Oliphant

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Lytton Strachey

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.

The artist must learn the difference between the appearance of an object and the interpretation of this object through his medium. The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

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

As all Art depends on Vision, so the different kinds of Art depend on the different ways in which minds look at things.

George Henry Lewes

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

Federico Fellini

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.

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

James McNeill Whistler

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords — philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

Anna Brownell Jameson

Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.

In the arts, the critic is the only independent source of information. The rest is advertising.

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

If the universal is the essential, then it is the basis of all life and art. Recognizing and uniting with universal therefore gives us the greatest aesthetic satisfaction, the greatest emotion of beauty. the more this union with the universal is felt, the more individual subjectivity declines.

I do not deny that I have made drawings and watercolors of an erotic nature. But they are always works of art. Are there no artists who have done erotic pictures?

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.