Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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.

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.

So many gods, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
While just the art of being kind
Is all the sad world needs.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

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

"Cage's Music of Changes was a further indication that the arts in general were beginning to consciously deal with the "given" material and, to varying degrees, liberating them from the inherited, functional concepts of control."

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

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

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification — the art of discerning what we may with advantage omit.

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.

All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer — at least the answer for myself. Art is an action against death. It is denial of death.

Jacques Lipchitz

There was a whole language that I could never make function for myself; it revolved around words like 'tortured', 'struggle'. 'pain'... I could never see these qualities in paint – I could see them in life and art that illustrates life. But I could not see such conflicts in the materials and I knew that it had to be in the attitude of the painter.

Robert Rauschenberg

With Dada I … have in common a certain mistrust toward power. We don't like authority, we don't like power, To me art is a form of manifest revolt, total and complete. It's a political attitude which doesn't need to found a political party. It's not a matter of taking power; when you are against it, you can't take it. We're against all forms of force which aggregate and crystallize an authority that oppresses people. Obviously this is not a characteristic of my art alon-it's much more general, a basic political attitude. It's a clear intention, more necessary today than ever, to oppose all forms of force emanating from a managing, centralising political power.

Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.

Benjamin Jowett

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

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.

You can be good at technology and like fashion and art. You can be good at technology and be a jock. You can be good at technology and be a mom. You can do it your way, on your terms.

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

They say princes learn no art truly, but the art of horsemanship. The reason is, the brave beast is no flatterer. He will throw a prince as soon as his groom.

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

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once, and they require separate techniques.

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

Samuel Butler (novelist)

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.

In our world, in which religious images are losing their meaning, in which our customs are getting more and more secular, we are losing our sense of the eternal. I think it's a loss that has done a great deal of damage to modern art. Painting is a return to origins.

In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

Art is magic. So say the surrealists. But how is it magic? In its metaphysical development? Or does some final transformation culminate in a magic reality? In truth, the latter is impossible without the former. If creation is not magic, the outcome cannot be magic. To worship the product and ignore its development leads to dilettantism and reaction. Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.