Good quotes about Art: Some of the best great quotes about Art
You don’t take a photograph, you make it. – Ansel Adams
Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. – Scott Adams
There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept. – Ansel Adams
There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs. – Ansel Adams
The negative is comparable to the composer’s score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways. – Ansel Adams
Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs. – Ansel Adams
Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. – Stella Adler
A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know. – Diane Arbus
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. – Aristotle
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. – W. H. Auden
My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph. – Richard Avedon
Acting is a matter of giving away secrets. – Ellen Barkin
Everything that is beautiful and noble is the product of reason and calculation. – Charles Baudelaire
Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary. – Cecil Beaton
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. – Henry Ward Beecher
Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art. – Ambrose Bierce
Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic. – Ambrose Bierce
Words are often seen hunting for an idea, but ideas are never seen hunting for words. – Josh Billings
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment. – Josh Billings
Great dreams… never even get out of the box. It takes an uncommon amount of guts to put your dreams on the line, to hold them up and say, “How good or how bad am I?” That’s where courage comes in. – Erma Bombeck
To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event. – Henri Cartier-Bresson
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
I don’t want to see pictures of Hollywood stars in their dressing gowns taking out the rubbish. It ruins the fantasy. – Sarah Brightman
I have a love-hate relationship with performing. – Sarah Brightman
You do have to be fairly selfish when you have a gift. You cannot afford to let too many outside things get in the way. – Sarah Brightman
I paint with shapes. – Alexander Calder
My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six. – Alexander Calder
To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there’s no such thing as perfect. – Alexander Calder
I don’t need the money, dear. I work for art. – Maria Callas
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say. – Italo Calvino
All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door. – Albert Camus
Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. – Albert Camus
Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. – Al Capp
The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure. – Dale Carnegie
Mine was the role of the oilcan in making the machinery clunk around. – Hugh Casson
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself – life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose. – Willa Cather
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
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 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’s bad art. – Marc Chagall
Great art picks up where nature ends. – Marc Chagall
I adore the theater and I am a painter. I think the two are made for a marriage of love. I will give all my soul to prove this once more. – Marc Chagall
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. – Marc Chagall
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. – Gilbert K. Chesterton
Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. – Gilbert K. Chesterton
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
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. – John Ciardi
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
In Chicago, we may not think the Picasso presiding over the Richard J. Daley Center plaza is art, but we know it’s a big Picasso and it’s the city’s Picasso, and when the Cubs made the play-offs, the sculpture wore a baseball cap just like everything else. – Pat Colander
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
An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. – Charles Horton Cooley
One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide. – Charles Horton Cooley
There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction. – Salvador Dali
Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad. – Salvador Dali
Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality. – Salvador Dali
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. – Salvador Dali
Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do. – Edgar Degas
The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing. – Eugene Delacroix
Composers shouldn’t think too much – it interferes with their plagiarism. – Howard Dietz
Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail. – Theodore Dreiser
Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe. – John Gregory Dunne
The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness. – Max Eastman
True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist. – Albert Einstein
So-called art restoration is at least as tricky as brain surgery. Most pictures expire under scalpel and sponge. – Alexander Eliot
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. – T. S. Eliot
Every artist writes his own autobiography. – Henry Ellis
Pictures must not be too picturesque. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Are you really sure that a floor can’t also be a ceiling? – M. C. Escher
Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it’s in my basement… let me go upstairs and check. – M. C. Escher
We adore chaos because we love to produce order. – M. C. Escher
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
Artists can color the sky red because they know it’s blue. Those of us who aren’t artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we’re stupid. – Jules Feiffer
All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography. – Federico Fellini
Of all lies, art is the least untrue. – Gustave Flaubert
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
What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art. – Augustus Saint-Gaudens
In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters. – Paul Gauguin
Art is either plagiarism or revolution. – Paul Gauguin
There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite. – Paul Gauguin
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
Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed. – Kahlil Gibran
Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. – Andre Gide
Art begins with resistance – at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor. – Andre Gide
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 painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world. – Edmond de Goncourt
Rice Krispies happens to be one of my favorite junk foods, just as I regard Michener as superior among junk writers. – Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives. – Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
I cry out for order and find it only in art. – Helen Hayes
Rules and models destroy genius and art. – William Hazlitt
The irrepressible spirit that made his playing seem like good conversation is the Rubinstein legacy for pianists, if they can pick up their heads from the keyboard long enough to claim it. – Donal Henahan
Anything simple always interests me. – David Hockney
The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist. – David Hockney
The most profound things are inexpressible. – Jenny Holzer
Art is not a thing; it is a way. – Elbert Hubbard
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
Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads. – Erica Jong
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
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. – Ellen Key
Have not prisons – which kill all will and force of character in man, which enclose within their walls more vices than are met with on any other spot of the globe – always been universities of crime? – Peter Kropotkin
Andy Warhol made fame more famous. – Fran Lebowitz
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
Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie. – John LeCarre
When I was a little kid, I took tap and ballet. I’ve always loved to dance. I’m a rhythm machine. – Tommy Lee
The fact that writers will go through so much to remain writers says something, perhaps everything. It would be far easier (and nearly always more profitable) to become a real estate agent. – Maria Lenhart
You can’t start at the top. – Elmer G. Letterman
I’m a study of a man in chaos in search of frenzy. – Oscar Levant
Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you’ll find the real tinsel underneath. – Oscar Levant
Page topic: Good quotes about Art: Some of the best great quotes about Art
