Art Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.

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

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

William Butler Yeats

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

I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day apart from representation.

Robert Smithson

Art has a double visage: it looks before and after. Romance is its forward-looking face. The germ of growth is in romanticism. Formalism, on the other hand, consolidates tradition; gleans what has been gained and makes it facile to the hand or the mind; economizes the energy of genius.

George Edward Woodberry

I suppose art is the only thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

Elizabeth Bowen

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

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides.

To so enter into it in nature and art that the enjoyed meanings of life may become a part of living is the attitude of aesthetic appreciation.

George Herbert Mead

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

Edmund Clarence Stedman

I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.

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

Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.