253 quotes about Arts and Artists

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

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

Arp, Jean

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

Any artist should be grateful for a naïve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

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.

Benjamin, Walter

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

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

Blackie, Professor

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it.

Burgess, Anthony

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.

Butler, Samuel

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

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.

Chagall, Marc

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Churchill, Winston

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

Ciardi, John

Art is science made clear.

Cocteau, Jean

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.

Conrad, Joseph

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.

Dali, Salvador

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

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

Delacroix, Eugene

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.

Eastman, Max

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The true poem is the poet's mind.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

New arts destroy the old.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Every artist was first an amateur.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

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. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.

Fisher, Carrie

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

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.

French, Marilyn

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Gauguin, Paul

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.

Geldzahler, Henry

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Gordimer, Nadine

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

A picture is a poem without words.

Horace

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

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

Jacob, Max

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.

James, Henry

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

Johnson, Samuel

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves It's pretty, but is it Art?

Kipling, Rudyard

Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.

Klee, Paul

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

Klee, Paul

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.

Kramer, Hilton

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

Caricature is rough truth.

Meredith, George

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

Michelangelo

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

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

Morris, William

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

Nathan, George Jean

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

Picasso, Pablo

Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

Picasso, Pablo

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

Quinet, Edgar

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

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

Sand, George

The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.

Santayana, George

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

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.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

Unknown, Source

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

Unknown, Source

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

Unknown, Source

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Unknown, Source

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

Unknown, Source

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

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

Warhol, Andy

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Whitehead, Alfred North

In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.

Wilde, Oscar

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

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

Wilde, Oscar

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.

Wilde, Oscar

All art is quite useless.

Wilde, Oscar

Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.

Wilde, Oscar

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

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

Yu Cao

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile