Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

I wrote in the War of Art that I could divide my life neatly into two parts: before turning pro and after. After is better.

Steven Pressfield

The artist must learn the difference between the appearance of an object and the interpretation of this object through his medium. The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

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

Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.

The art of being taught is the art of discovery, as the art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery to take place

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

But since the world, which thou art to strive against, is not without thee, but within thee, it follows, that it is also to be conquered not without, but within thee.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

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

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.

Now I think, speaking roughly, by leadership we mean the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

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

Samuel Butler (novelist)

"Art" is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers…what we call art is a game.

Chess for me is not a game, but an art. Yes, and I take upon myself all those responsibilities which an art imposes on its adherents.

Alexander Alekhine

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.

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.

I used to go and flatten my nose against that window and absorb all I could of his art. It changed my life. I saw art then as I wanted to see it.

What appears spectral today will be natural tomorrow. Where are such signs and works? How do we recognize the genuine ones? Like everything genuine, its inner life guarantees its truth. All works of art created by truthful minds without regard for the work's conventional exterior remain genuine for all times... The present isolation of the rare, genuine artist is absolutely unavoidable for the moment... This fact leads us to the idea that we are standing today at the turning point of two long epochs, similar to the state of the world fifteen hundred years ago, when there was also a transitional period without art and religion - a period in which great and traditional ideas died and new and unexpected ones took their place.

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

Charles Baudelaire

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

Edmund Clarence Stedman

Marriage always demands the greatest understanding of the art of insincerity possible between two human beings.

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

Alfred de Vigny

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

Lincoln Steffens

Art does not, like science, set forth a permanent order of nature, the enduring skeleton of law. Two factors primarily determine its works: one is the idea in the mind of the artist, the other is his power of expression; and both these factors are extremely variable.

George Edward Woodberry