Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.

The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail.

John Wesley Powell

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

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practising it.

Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways. But the good artists who follow after genius — and I count myself among these — have to restore the lost connection once more. A pure studio art is unfruitful and frail, for anything that does not form living roots — why should it exist at all?

Käthe Kollwitz

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.

Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.

Alfred de Vigny

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.

Someone said that Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

John W. Gardner

Art, to me is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain. The word 'Impressionism' as applied to art has been abused, and in the general acceptance of the term has become perverted. [...] The true impressionism is realism. So many people do not observe. They take the ready-made axioms laid down by others, and walk blindly in a rut without trying to see for themselves.

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

Charles Baudelaire

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

Works of art make rules but rules do not make works of art.

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

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.

Claes Oldenburg

It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. This is the essence of academism. There is no such thing as good painting about nothing. We assert that only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.

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.

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

All things are artificial, for nature is the Art of God.

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

Samuel Butler (novelist)

We must have religion for religion's sake, morality for morality's sake, as with art for art's sake…the beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself.

It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles. The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win. Even though you can't expect to defeat the absurdity of the world, you must make that attempt. That's morality, that's religion. That's art. That's life.

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

Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.

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.