Friday, September 14, 2012

Art Quotes

A picture is worth a thousand words. 
Napoleon Bonaparte 


A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. 
Oscar Wilde 


A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession. 
Albert Camus 


The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude. 
Friedrich Nietzsche 


The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. 
Aristotle 


An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness. 
Henry Miller

If you hear a voice within you say 'you cannot paint,' then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced. 
Vincent Van Gogh 


A picture is a poem without words. 
Horace 


Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. 
Twyla Tharp 


A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires. 
Hedy Lamarr 


Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed. 
Khalil Gibran 


In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 


Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known. 
Oscar Wilde 


This world is but a canvas to our imagination. 
Henry David Thoreau 


A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. 
Michelangelo 


Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. 
Thomas Merton 


An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. 
Charles Horton Cooley 


No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. 
Oscar Wilde 


A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears. 
Gertrude Stein 


Art is the proper task of life. 
Friedrich Nietzsche


Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life. 
Oscar Wilde 


Every artist was first an amateur. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 


You don't take a photograph, you make it. 
Ansel Adams 


Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others. 
Jonathan Swift 


True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist. 
Albert Einstein 


An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have. 
Andy Warhol

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. 
George Bernard Shaw 


Pictures must not be too picturesque. 
Ralph Waldo Emerson 


Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. 
Henry Ward Beecher 


Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century. 
Marshall McLuhan 


We have art in order not to die of the truth. 
Friedrich Nietzsche 


The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person. 
Abraham Lincoln 


The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls. 
Pablo Picasso 


Personality is everything in art and poetry. 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 


An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. 
George Santayana 


I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. 
Georgia O'Keeffe 


Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. 
Salvador Dali 


Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. 
Gilbert K. Chesterton 


In art the best is good enough. 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 


Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth. 
John Ruski


Art is not a thing; it is a way. 
Elbert Hubbard 


I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning. 
Andy Warhol 


Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. 
Gilbert K. Chesterton 


The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art. 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 


All art is but imitation of nature. 
Lucius Annaeus Seneca 


Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. 
Ambrose Bierce

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. 
Albert Camus 


The beginning is the most important part of the work. 
Plato 


Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic. 
Ambrose Bierce 


An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it. 
Paul Valery 


A great artist is always before his time or behind it. 
George Edward Moore 


If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it. 
Anais Nin 


Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun. 
Pablo Picasso 


Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse. 
Winston Churchill 


Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. 
Andre Gide 


The history of art is the history of revivals. 
Samuel Butler 


Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. 
John Ruskin 


Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. 
Gilbert K. Chesterton 


An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision. 
James Whistler 


Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse. 
Francis Bacon


Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. 
Scott Adams 


Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. 
Gustave Flaubert 


The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web. 
Pablo Picasso 


I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good. 
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe 


Rules and models destroy genius and art. 
William Hazlitt 


Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul. 
W. Somerset Maugham

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye. 
Honore de Balzac 


Every good painter paints what he is. 
Jackson Pollock 


To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it. 
Leo Tolstoy 


Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first. 
Arthur Schopenhauer 


Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. 
Ansel Adams 


Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum. 
Oliver Wendell Holmes 


The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. 
Emile Zola 


Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed. 
Frank Lloyd Wright 


So vast is art, so narrow human wit. 
Alexander Pope 


All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography. 
Federico Fellini 


Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century. 
Marshall McLuhan 


The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment. 
David Herbert Lawrence 


The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure. 
Dale Carnegie 


When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art. 
Paul Cezanne


The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity. 
Walt Whitman 



What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. 
John Updike 



Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time. 
Jean Cocteau 



Art is either plagiarism or revolution. 
Paul Gauguin 


The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination. 
Elbert Hubbard 


The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. 
William Faulkner

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. 
Salvador Dali 


The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts. 
Henry Miller 


Of all lies, art is the least untrue. 
Gustave Flaubert 


Every artist writes his own autobiography. 
Havelock Ellis 


Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. 
Al Capp 


Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. 
Pablo Picasso 


To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way. 
E. M. Forster 


Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake. 
E. M. Forster 


Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle. 
Michelangelo 


Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal. 
Igor Stravinsky 


Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man's fate. 
Andre Malraux 


Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men. 
Friedrich Schiller 


A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds. 
Henry Moore 


Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass. 
Fran Lebowitz



Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture. 
Arthur Erickson 



Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth. 
Theodor Adorno 



The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. 
Theodor Adorno 



Art is science made clear. 
Wilson Mizner 


In art as in love, instinct is enough. 
Anatole France 


The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke. 
Jerzy Kosinski

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art. 
Harry S. Truman 


The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. 
Michelangelo 


The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal. 
Elia Kazan 


I've never really had a hobby, unless you count art, which the IRS once told me I had to declare as a hobby since I hadn't made money with it. 
Laurie Anderson 


Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture. 
Arthur Erickson 


My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process. 
Tadao Ando 


My love of fine art increased - the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see. 
Paul Getty 


Art begins with resistance - at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor. 
Andre Gide 


I cry out for order and find it only in art. 
Helen Hayes 


Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos. 
Stephen Sondheim 


Things are beautiful if you love them. 
Jean Anouilh 


To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event. 
Henri Cartier-Bresson 


I think about my work every minute of the day. 
Jeff Koons 


I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own. 
Jackson Pollock



Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued. 
Jean Rostand 



When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God. 
Robert Mapplethorpe 



Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies. 
Anish Kapoor 



Art is man's expression of his joy in labor. 
Henry A. Kissinger 


Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. 
Isaac Bashevis Singer 


An artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs. 
Edgard Varese

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above. 
Cyril Connolly 


No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language. 
Theodore Bikel 


Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal. 
Lionel Trilling 


By the work one knows the workman. 
Jean de La Fontaine 


The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist. 
David Hockney 


I've been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good. 
Barbra Streisand 


Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home. 
Gwendolyn Brooks 


There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. 
Ansel Adams 


The perfection of art is to conceal art. 
Quintilian 


Vision is the true creative rhythm. 
Robert Delaunay 


Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is. 
Henri Matisse 


Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence. 
Henri Matisse 


Trying to force creativity is never good. 
Sarah McLachlan 


My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art. 
Clara Schumann



To make pictures big is to make them more powerful. 
Robert Mapplethorpe 



I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing. 
Francis Ford Coppola 



The principle of art is to pause, not bypass. 
Jerzy Kosinski 



The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist. 
Novalis 


That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind. 
James Taylor 


I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me. 
Roy Lichtenstein

Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do. 
Edgar Degas 


Even a true artist does not always produce art. 
Carroll O'Connor 


The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavor. 
Paul Getty 


Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist. 
Franz Liszt 


Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail. 
Theodore Dreiser 


Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them. 
William Wordsworth 


Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art. 
Miguel Angel Ruiz 


I think an artist's responsibility is more complex than people realize. 
Jodie Foster 


I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. 
Auguste Rodin 


My painting does not come from the easel. 
Jackson Pollock 


Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. 
Robert Smithson 


To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist. 
Robert Schumann 


Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. 
Dorothea Lange 


The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture. 
Salvador Dali



I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things. 
Henri Matisse 



Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product. 
Edward Steichen 



What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time. 
John Berger 



The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress. 
Hendrik Willem Van Loon 


Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. 
John Ciardi 


When I make art, I think about its ability to connect with others, to bring them into the process. 
Jim Hodges

You begin with the possibilities of the material. 
Robert Rauschenberg 


Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms. 
Roy Lichtenstein 


Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums. 
Peter De Vries 


If a building becomes architecture, then it is art. 
Arne Jacobsen 


When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection. 
Agnes Martin 


Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding. 
Gian Carlo Menotti 


The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box. 
Henri Cartier-Bresson 


Painting is by nature a luminous language. 
Robert Delaunay 


Light in Nature creates the movement of colors. 
Robert Delaunay 


Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint. 
Robert Delaunay 


Art is subject to arbitrary fashion. 
Kary Mullis 


When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration. 
Edward Steichen 


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


In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death. 
Damien Hirst



A painting that is well composed is half finished. 
Pierre Bonnard 



Wherever art appears, life disappears. 
Robert Motherwell 



The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing. 
Eugene Delacroix 



I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza. 
Robert Indiana 


It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. 
Max Eastman 


Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs. 
Thomas Wolfe

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public. 
Paul Gauguin 


Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul. 
Louis Kahn 


Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. 
Amy Lowell 


Photography is a major force in explaining man to man. 
Edward Steichen 


Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers... What we call art is a game. 
Octavio Paz 


Great art picks up where nature ends. 
Marc Chagall 


The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. 
Ellen Key 


The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it. 
Carl Rogers 


It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. 
Henry Moore 


I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I've done many. 
Robert Indiana 


I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists. 
Robert Indiana 


I paint with shapes. 
Alexander Calder 


To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect. 
Alexander Calder 


The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep. 
Paul Strand

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