Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

Thomas Shadwell

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

William Butler Yeats

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.

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

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.

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

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.

That is why I believe that art is so much more significant than either economics or philosophy. It is the direct measure of man's spiritual vision.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

The artistic temperament... sometimes seems to me to be a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling, and when the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.

Madeleine L'Engle

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

To create art with all the passion in one's soul is to live art with all the beauty in one's heart.

Movies are so rarely great art, that if we cannot appreciate great trash, we have very little reason to be interested in them.

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.

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

The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.