Tag: art quotes

Good Art quotes: Best famous quotes about Art

I don’t have big anxieties. I wish I did. I’d be much more interesting. – Roy Lichtenstein

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

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

Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma. – Hendrik Willem Van Loon

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

Giving jazz the Congressional seal of approval is a little like making Huck Finn an honorary Boy Scout. – Melvin Maddocks

I just think it’s important to be direct and honest with people about why you’re photographing them and what you’re doing. After all, you are taking some of their soul. – Mary Ellen Mark

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

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

You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover. – Henri Matisse

A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I’ve been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light. – Henri Matisse

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul. – Henri Matisse

I have always tried to hide my efforts and wished my works to have the light joyousness of springtime which never lets anyone suspect the labors it has cost me. – Henri Matisse

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

It is only after years of preparation that the young artist should touch color – not color used descriptively, that is, but as a means of personal expression. – Henri Matisse

I have been no more than a medium, as it were. – Henri Matisse

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter – a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue. – Henri Matisse

All autobiography is self-indulgent. – Daphne du Maurier

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

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

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

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle. – Michelangelo

I always try to balance the light with the heavy – a few tears of human spirit in with the sequins and the fringes. – Bette Midler

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. – Henry Mille

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it. – Georgia O’Keeffe

Sun-bleached bones were most wonderful against the blue – that blue that will always be there as it is now after all man’s destruction is finished. – Georgia O’Keeffe

Every science has for its basis a system of principles as fixed and unalterable as those by which the universe is regulated and governed. Man cannot make principles; he can only discover them. – Thomas Paine

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

You’ve gotta be original, because if you’re like someone else, what do they need you for? – Bernadette Peters

The artist is a receptacle for the 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

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

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

Give me a museum and I’ll fill it. – Pablo Picasso

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

Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. – Pablo Picasso

We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth. – Pablo Picasso

My mother said to me, “If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.” Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso. – Pablo Picasso

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks. – Plutarch

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. – Marcel Proust

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality… true art lies in a reality that is felt. – Odilon Redon

Our natures are a lot like oil, mix us with anything else, and we strive to swim on top. – Joan Rivers

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

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

I invent nothing, I rediscover. – Auguste Rodin

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

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

A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous. – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

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

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

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

All art is but imitation of nature. – Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The way is long if one follows precepts, but short… if one follows patterns. – Lucius Annaeus Seneca

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

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

I didn’t have any interest in traditional art. – Cindy Sherman

May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine. – Frank Sinatra

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

I don’t invent characters because the Almightly has already invented millions. Just like experts at fingerprints do not create fingerprints but learn how to read them. – Isaac Bashevis Singer

If you’re a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he’s good, the older he gets, the better he writes. – Mickey Spillane

You know… that a blank wall is an apalling thing to look at. The wall of a museum – a canvas – a piece of film – or a guy sitting in front of a typewriter. Then, you start out to do something – that vague thing called creation. The beginning strikes awe within you. – Edward Steichen

Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created. It is a major force in explaining man to man. – Edward Steichen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the river of the great 19th-century landscapists; of Cole, Cropsey and Church, and at the end of the summer it lies motionless under the haze as under a light coat of varnish. – Judith Thurman

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal. – Lionel Trilling

There are no absolute rules of conduct, either in peace or war. Everything depends on circumstances. – Leon Trotsky

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art. – Kenneth Tynan

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

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one’s obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all. – John Updike

Why not say it? I’m bursting out of my cocoon. It was all too nice in the past – it never knocked anyone out. But last year… my first opening night at the Met – I looked out and heard all that cheering… for me… And I loved it. – Benita Valente

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

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

For half a century photography has been the “art form” of the untalented. Obviously some pictures are more satisfactory than others, but where is credit due? to the designer of the camera? To the finger on the button? tso the law of averages? – Gore Vidal

Although nature commences with reason and ends in experience it is necessary for us to do the opposite, that is to commence with experience and from this to proceed to investigate the reason. – Leonardo da Vinci

An artist is someone who produces things that people don’t need to have but that he – for some reason – thinks it would be a good idea to give them. – Andy Warhol

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

Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery. – Andy Warhol

Don’t pay any attention to what they write about you. Just measure it in inches. – Andy Warhol

Dying is the most embarrassing thing that can ever happen to you, because someone’s got to take care of all your details. – Andy Warhol

I like boring things. – Andy Warhol

Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. – Andy Warhol

I am a deeply superficial person. – Andy Warhol

Thurber did not write the way a surgeon operates, he wrote the way a child skips rope, the way a mouse waltzes. – E. B. White

For an actress to be a success, she must have the face of Venus, the brains of a Minerva, the grace of Terpsichore, the memory of a Macaulay, the figure of Juno, and the hide of a rhinoceros. – Ella Wheeler Wilcox

All that I desire to point out is the general principle that life imitates art far more than art imitates life. – Oscar Wilde

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. – Oscar Wilde

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

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

Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. – William Wordsworth

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

The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines – so they should go as far as possible from home to build their first buildings. – Frank Lloyd Wright

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

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

Page topic: Good Art quotes: Best famous quotes about Art

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