Top 100 Art Quotes of All Time

A short, finished list rather than an endless feed: 100 of the best art quotes ever written, picked out of the full art archive on QuoteForever. You will find Albert Camus, Andrei Tarkovsky, Aldous Huxley and Ambrose Bierce among them.

Read the list top to bottom, or use it as a starting point - every author name links to everything else they said, and every quote has its own page you can share or turn into an image.

Reason is powerless in the expression of Love. - Rumi 1

Reason is powerless in the expression of Love.

2

Existence is movement. Action is movement. Existence is defined by the rhythm of forces in natural balance. (...) It is our appreciation for dance that allows us to see clearly the rhythms of nature and to take natural rhythm to a plane of well-organised art and culture.

3

Of course it's possible for political essays to be artful. I just want to call into question the dominance of content over form in the history of the essay. I want us to recognize that there's art involved in making this stuff, because we still don't approach the constructed nature of the essay with the same appreciation that we do poetry or fiction.

The secret of life is in art. - Oscar Wilde 4

The secret of life is in art.

5

The art of dining well is no slight art, the pleasure not a slight pleasure; neither the greatest captains nor the greatest philosophers have disdained the use or science of eating well.

6

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

7

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

8

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

9

The object of science is knowledge; the objects of art are works. In art, truth is the means to an end; in science, it is the only end. Hence the practical arts are not to be classed among the sciences

Is not education the art of drawing out full manhood of the children ... - Mahatma Gandhi 10

Is not education the art of drawing out full manhood of the children under training?

11

I'm not a nice girl; I'm a photographer. (On being told by a Federal Art Project official, after she photographed the Bowery, that a nice girl should not go into such neighborhoods )

The study of art is a lifetime matter. The best any artist can do is ... - Edgar Alwin Payne 12

The study of art is a lifetime matter. The best any artist can do is to accumulate all the knowledge possible of art and its principles, study nature often and then practice continually.

13

The world is a king, and like a king, desires flattery in return for favor; but true art is selfish and perverse — it will not submit to the mold of flattery.

14

It's taken folk a while to come around, hasn't it? Even the boys in the band weren't too sure about the whole art thing. They just wanted me to concentrate on the music. But they respect it now.

15

Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies.

16

Choose only one master - Nature.

17

The arts give us our identity as a community; they also draw new people, fresh visions, and renewable economic opportunity to our community.

18

Anyone who works on a quilt, who devotes her time, energy, creativity, and passion to that art, learns to value the work of her hands. And as any quilter will tell you, a quilter's quilting friends are some of the dearest, most generous, and most supportive people she knows.

19

. . .a sense of humor can be a great help-particularly a sense of humor about (oneself). William Howard Taft joked about his own corpulence and people loved it; took nothing from his inherent dignity. Lincoln eased tense moments with bawdy stories, and often poked fun at himself-and history honors him for this human quality. A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

20

The music that really turns me on is either running toward God or away from God. Both recognize the pivot, that God is at the center of the jaunt.

21

A basic law: the more you practice the art of thankfulness, the more you have to be thankful for.

22

I grew up playing everything from rugby, football, baseball, volleyball, bike races and boxing. I tried martial arts, loved to ride horses and I'm the youngest of three brothers, so it was a fiercely competitive family.

23

I enjoy going out by myself... always have, always will. I don't have security guards, and, for the most part, I enjoy meeting new people. I see myself as a regular guy who likes playing video games with his nieces and nephews and poker with his family. I don't have an art collection or take exotic vacations. I enjoy being at home.

24

I always thought the women of my age group got short shrift because the women's liberation movement came slightly after. You look at the yearbooks and you see the future homemakers of America - hurray for that - but you also see them in the engineers club. You see minority kids as student body presidents at a time when everyone was supposed to be terminally racist. Yearbooks are genres; they're also folk art, folk documentation.

25

While it is unlikely that poetry or art shall eliminate the reality of war in the twenty-first century, it is thrilling to know there remain individuals, and even entire communities, still willing to invest in art and poetry's own uniquely explosive contributions to the great, and small, dramas of human history.

26

I think comedy has evolved like every art form, and people probably do less standing around and telling jokes, and more things that have to do with reality.

27

There are some people who may not like precision in their art. They may like it to be grittier and more gestural, more of a direct expression in the way that a painter would put his strokes on canvas.

28

Can art be completely invented? It's a matter of shaping reality with the help of imagination.

29

My definition of art has always been the same. It is about freedom of expression. I don’t think anybody can separate art from politics. The intention to separate [the two] is itself a very political intention.

30

Life is an art, not a science. You make it up as you go along.

31

Art is commenting on what's going on around you in your life.

32

Art should stimulate.

33

If we are inclined to forget how much there is in the world besides that which we anticipate, then works of art are perhaps a little to blame, for in them we find at work the same process of simplification or selection as in the imagination.

34

Tolerance of diversity is imperative, because without it, life would lose its savor. Progress in the arts, in the sciences, in the patterns of social adjustment springs from diversity and depends upon a tolerance of individual deviations from conventional ways and attitudes.

35

Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings.

36

In life as well as in art Zen never wastes energy in stopping to explain; it only indicates.

37

After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.

38

The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.

39

...Any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

40

As I grew older, I realized that it was much better to insist on the genuine forms of nature, for simplicity is the greatest adornment of art.

41

One of the anomalies of modern ecology is the creation of two groups, each of which seems barely aware of the existence of the other. The one studies the human community, almost as if it were a separate entity, and calls its findings sociology, economics and history. The other studies the plant and animal community and comfortably relegates the hodge-podge of politics to the liberal arts. The inevitable fusion of these two lines of thought will, perhaps, constitute the outstanding advance of this century.

42

Art, I suppose, is only for beginners, who have made up in their minds to be content with symbols rather than with what they signify, with the elegantly composed recipe in lieu of actual dinner.

43

If it were not for the intellectual snobs who pay - in solid cash - the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.

44

After all, what more does a true genius want? The mind itself is the palace where all the real treasures, the works of art, the indulgences exist.

45

The art of reading is to skip judiciously.

46

Photographers should make three or four prints from one negative and then crop them differently. When I was art director at Harper's Bazaar and at several agencies as a consultant, young photographers would bring me their portfolios and all the prints would be in the same standard proportions, either for the Leica or the Rolleiflex. Many times, by limiting themselves in this way, they missed the true potentialities of their photographs.

47

Miles and I had been looking to do a martial arts show for some time. Our first two movies that we wrote were "Lethal Weapon 4" and "Shanghai Noon" with Jackie Chan. Then we sort of got pulled into the superhero world, but then you look around at what's not on television and there wasn't really a martial arts shows. There are shows that do martial arts to a degree, but there's not a martial arts show.

48

There are many schools of painting. Why should there not be many schools of photographic art? There is hardly a right and a wrong in these matters, but there is truth, and that should form the basis of all works of art.

49

You have to make a choice when you start to sing and decide whether you want to service the music, and be at the top of your art, or if you want to be a very popular tenor.

50

When I was in my studio I didn't give a damn what sex I was... I thought art is art.

51

The artist...is the voice of the people.

52

Sincerity and the correct use of the voice are the greatest things in the art of acting.

53

Objects of every sort are materials for the new art: paint, food, chairs, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things which will be discovered by the present generation of artists.

54

I was at college doing performing arts, and just spending all my time mucking about, and the lecturers thought I would be pretty good at stand-up, so I gave it a whirl.

55

Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even historically; even were the connection an historical fact, they would not stand connected as art, for no one experiences raw history.

56

I do quite a lot of art, with a small 'a'. I guess that is how I was dredged up, with paints and crayons. Even when I was at nursery, I knew instinctively how to mix colours, how to make purple or orange.

57

I love all kinds of art. I mean, I love sketching and acting and music.

58

A cheap and easy cynicism rails at everything. The master of the art accomplishes the formidable task of discrimination.

59

art, n. This word has no definition.

60

My art is grounded in the belief of one universal energy which runs through everything: from insect to man, from man to spectre, from spectre to plant from plant to galaxy. My works are the irrigation veins of this universal fluid. Through them ascend the ancestral sap, the original beliefs, the primordial accumulations, the unconscious thoughts that animate the world

61

I practice the martial arts. I don't practice MMA. MMA is my job, MMA is a new sport. Martial arts is the knowledge from the ages.

62

"Let the dead bury the dead." There is not a single word of Christ to which the Christian religion has paid less attention.

63

Art that submits to orthodoxy, to even the soundest doctrines, but lacks imagination and deep self-expression is lost leaving only the craftsmanship.

64

You can only make art that talks to the masses when you have nothing to say to them.

65

The future science of government should be called 'la cybernétique' (1843) Coining the French word to mean 'the art of governing,' from the Greek (Kybernetes = navigator or steersman), subsequently adopted as cybernetics by Norbert Weiner for the field of control and communication theory.

66

...art must must carry man's craving for the ideal, must be an expression of his reaching out towards it; that art must give man hope and faith. And the more hopeless the world in the artist's version, the more clearly perhaps must we see the ideal that stands in opposition - otherwise life becomes impossible! Art symbolises the meaning of our existence.

67

I'VE NOTICED, FROM MY EXPERIENCE, IF THE EXTERNAL, EMOTIONAL CONSTRUCTION OF IMAGES IN A FILM ARE BASED ON THE FILMMAKER'S OWN MEMORY, ON THE KINSHIP OF ONE'S PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH THE FABRIC OF THE FILM, THEN THE FILM WILL HAVE THE POWER TO AFFECT THOSE WHO SEE IT.

68

Art is realistic when it strives to express an ethical ideal. Realism is striving for truth, and truth is always beautiful. Here the aesthetic coincides with the ethical.

69

If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.

70

Art indeed is long, but life is short.

71

A living museum must surely see itself as a locus of argument. A breathing art institution is not a lockup but a moveable feast.

72

When I was at art school, a lot of art education is about art being a means of self-expression, and as an 18-year-old I didn't know if I had a huge amount I wanted to express. It was a big moment when I decided I wanted to shift the emphasis or the intention of my art from something I disgorged myself upon and something that actually fed me or made me see the world or understand the world.

73

There's a side that I want to do just like really retarded arty films … like parody, pretentious art films that kind of are supposed to have some deep meaning.

74

The most beautiful pieces of art come from the ugliest situations.

75

Pop art is for everyone.

76

If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it.

77

I see a movie as a way of learning about the world, about myself, and learning about my relationship with people and art.

78

Making a martial arts film in English to me is the same as John Wayne speaking Chinese in a western.

79

He was prepared to die for it, as one of Baudelaire's dandies might have been prepared to kill himself in order to preserve himself in the condition of a work of art, for he wanted to make this experience a masterpiece of experience which absolutely transcended the everyday. And this would annihilate the effects of the cruel drug, boredom, to which he was addicted although, perhaps, the element of boredom which is implicit in an affair so isolated from the real world was its principle appeal for him.

80

Maturity is the art of living in peace with that which cannot be changed, the courage to change that which should be changed, no matter what it takes, and the wisdom to know the difference.

81

All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love.

82

The dichotomy between art and industry is totally dysfunctional in terms of film.

83

A good taste in art feels the presence or the absence of merit; a just taste discriminates the degree--the poco piu and the poco meno. A good taste rejects faults; a just taste selects excellences. A good taste is often unconscious; a just taste is always conscious. A good taste may be lowered or spoilt; a just taste can only go on refining more and more.

84

Commit to finding the true nature of art. Go for that thing no one can teach you.

85

I'm inspired by looking at art, by looking at precedent. Looking is what you have to do if you want to make things, so you develop a critical eye.

86

Obviously in Art of Noise, I'm just part of the group, and when I do film scores, it's always in collaboration with the director and other people involved.

87

But during all these years I had a vague but persistent desire to return to New Orleans. I never forgot New Orleans. And when we were in tropical places and places of those flowers and trees that grow in Louisiana, I would think of it acutely and I would feel for my home the only glimmer of desire I felt for anything outside my endless pursuit of art.

88

In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art--the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard's canvases--beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the earth had been eons before man had one single coherent thought in his head or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of clay. Beauty was a Savage Garden.

89

artists often lie behind on the field long after the art combine, the broad-bladed harvester of informed criticism, has mowed, bailed, and stored the crop.

90

All these things that we are very nostalgic for come from a place of technology dictating [art]. This time and place is no different.

91

It is easy to take a photograph, but it is harder to make a masterpiece in photography than in any other art medium.

92

Art is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit.

93

Picture-taking is an ensemble art-like theater.

94

I think one of the things you have to have is a respect for the camera, a real respect, and a real love for it, and to really, when I say take it seriously, quote 'seriously', I mean not patronize it. It's a big mistake to patronize it and think it's a third rate medium, because it's not, it's a great art form.

95

The Constitution exists precisely so that opinions and judgments, including esthetic and moral judgments about art and literature, can be formed, tested, and expressed. What the Constitution says is that these judgments are for the individual to make, not for the Government to decree, even with the mandate or approval of a majority. Technology expands the capacity to choose; and it denies the potential of this revolution if we assume the Government is best positioned to make these choices for us.

96

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

97

I love movies; I grew up loving movies. I've always loved movies. I never thought about making movies until I took art classes and then I started studying different artists. As you study paintings, you see light and shadow, of course - Rembrandt, Eugène Delacroix. You start to understand the relationship between people and art, and images. For me, between movies that I watched and art, it was like, I'd love to make moving art. Moving pictures.

98

The art of drawing conclusions from experiments and observations consists in evaluating probabilities and in estimating whether they are sufficiently great or numerous enough to constitute proofs. This kind of calculation is more complicated and more difficult than it is commonly thought to be. . . .

99

The wealthy are always surrounded by hangers-on; science and art are as well.

100

Abstract art has helped us to experience the emotional power inherent in pure form.

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