Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The growth of art seems to be in cycles, and often its vigorous lifetime is restricted to a century or two. The periods of distinctive drama, Greek, English, Spanish, fall within such a limit; the schools of painting and sculpture likewise; and, in poetry, the Victorian age or the school of Pope will serve as examples.

George Edward Woodberry

Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

Christopher Marlowe

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

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

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

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

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.

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.

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

No art that is not in the end understood by the People can live or ever did live a single generation.

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world – in order to set up a shadow world of 'meanings'.

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

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

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

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

Sticks and stones are hard on bones.
Aimed with angry art,
Words can sting like anything.
But silence breaks the heart.

Phyllis McGinley

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