Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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.

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

A. Bartlett Giamatti

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

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?

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite — getting something down.

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

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

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

Benjamin Jowett

Art and religion first; then philosophy; lastly science. That is the order of the great subjects of life, that's their order of importance.

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

All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography.

Federico Fellini

Words may be false and full of art,
Sighs are the natural language of the heart.

Thomas Shadwell

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

"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."

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.

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

Christopher Marlowe

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on.

Ulysses S. Grant

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.

Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.

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

Lincoln Steffens

The one thing to say about art is that it is one thing. Art is art-as-art and everything else is everything else. Art-as-art is nothing but art. Art is not what is not art.

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

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.

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

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.