Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We work in the dark — we do what we can — we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

It seems likely that many of the young who don't wait for others to call them artists, but simply announce that they are, don't have the patience to make 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.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Walter Benjamin

Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.

Remy de Gourmont

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

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.

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.

Laurence J. Peter

We consider the beauty of nature and art with pleasure and satisfaction, without the slightest movement of desire. Instead, it appears to be a particular mark of beauty that it is considered with tranquil satisfaction; that it pleases if we also do not possess it and we are still far removed from demanding to possess it

Moses Mendelssohn

For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords — philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

Anna Brownell Jameson

procrastination is the
art of keeping
up with yesterday

It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.

Ah, music! What a beautiful art! But what a wretched profession!

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

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

A. Bartlett Giamatti

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. For ignorance is the first requisite of the historian – ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Lytton Strachey

I do not deny that I have made drawings and watercolors of an erotic nature. But they are always works of art. Are there no artists who have done erotic pictures?

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

Catherine Drinker Bowen

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control.

Robert Smithson

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work.

James McNeill Whistler

An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.

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