Art Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has conquered all the difficulties, after one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

Frédéric Chopin

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

The time to read is any time: no apparatus, no appointment of time and place, is necessary. It is the only art which can be practiced at any hour of the day or night, whenever the time and inclination comes, that is your time for reading; in joy or sorrow, health or illness.

Holbrook Jackson

And really the purpose of art - for me, fiction - is to alert, to indicate to stop, to say: Make certain that when you rush through you will not miss the moment which you might have had, or might still have.

Jerzy Kosiński

Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur.

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

Good composition is like a suspension bridge; each line adds strength and takes none away... Making lines run into each other is not composition. There must be motive for the connection. Get the art of controlling the observer – that is composition.

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

Laurence J. Peter

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

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

To me, the body says what words cannot. I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people.
Dance is the hidden language of the soul, of the body. And it's partly the language that we don't want to show.

Fashion is a potency in art, making it hard to judge between the temporary and the lasting.

Edmund Clarence Stedman

If art has a purpose, it is to interpret life, reproduce it in fresh visions.

Catherine Drinker Bowen

Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.

A. Bartlett Giamatti

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

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.