Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

One must do the same subject over again ten times, a hundred times. In art nothing must resemble an accident, not even movement.

Our father who art in heaven
Stay there
And we will stay here on earth
Which is sometimes so pretty

Jacques Prévert

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'.

In any art there are a lot of technical things that you can get to like. Building is just skilled labor, I suppose. It's a lot of work. I don't mind other people building them, but the way things go together and are made is interesting to me; I like that a lot. I pay a lot of attention to how things are done and the whole activity of building something is interesting.

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

Robert Motherwell

Let us never forget that the cultivation of the earth is the most important labor of man. Man may be civilized, in some degree, without great progress in manufactures and with little commerce with his distant neighbors. But without the cultivation of the earth, he is, in all countries, a savage. Until he gives up the chase, and fixes himself in some place and seeks a living from the earth, he is a roaming barbarian. When tillage begins, other arts follow. The farmers, therefore, are the founders of human civilization.

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

Set me a task in which I can put something of my very self, and it is a task no longer; it is joy; it is art.

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate hut at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

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

Art, to me, is the interpretation of the impression which nature makes upon the eye and brain.

Art must unquestionably have a social value; that is, as a potential means of communication it must be addressed, and in comprehensible terms, to the understanding of mankind.

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

Catherine Drinker Bowen

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

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

A. Bartlett Giamatti

I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art –and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.

Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion. Art should not, it seems to me, pose the real as a preoccupation. Nothing is more unreal than certain so-called realist novels — they're nightmares. It is possible to achieve in a novel a certain sensory truth — the true feeling of a character — that is all.

Françoise Sagan

Art, true art, is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

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

The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Elizabeth Bishop

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

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