Art Quotes

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

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

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

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

» 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.

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

» Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

» I paint with shapes.

» My fan mail is enormous. Everyone is under six.

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

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

» So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

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

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

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

» 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.

» In art as in love, instinct is enough.

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

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

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

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

» I like boring things.

» Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.

» I am a deeply superficial person.

» 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.

» Artists don't make objects. Artists make mythologies.

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

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

» There are no rules for good photographs, there are only good photographs.

» The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.

» Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

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

» Well begun is half done.

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

» Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

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

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

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

» 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.

» You've gotta be original, because if you're like someone else, what do they need you for?

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

» Eloquence is a painting of the thoughts.

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

» Even a true artist does not always produce art.

» 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.

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

» An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

» One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.

» We breathe, we think, we conceive of our lives as narratives.

» I didn't have any interest in traditional art.

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

» 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.

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

» All autobiography is self-indulgent.

» Anything simple always interests me.

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

» Every song is like a painting.

» Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.

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

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

» A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

» 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.

» Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

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

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

» Art is not a thing; it is a way.

» 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.

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

» I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.

» 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.

» Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

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

» You can't start at the top.

» 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.

» 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.

» The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

» The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.

» Everyone has talent. What is rare is the courage to follow that talent to the dark place where it leads.

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

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

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

» Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.

» Art depends on luck and talent.

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

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

» 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.

» May you live to be 100 and may the last voice you hear be mine.

» Andy Warhol made fame more famous.

» 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.

» Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.

» The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

» Art is the proper task of life.

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

» An artist has no home in Europe except in Paris.

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

» Art is the daughter of freedom.

» Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

» A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

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

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

» 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.

» 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.

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

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

» 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.

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

» Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

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

» The real art of conducting consists in transitions.

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

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

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

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

» Somewhere in the world there is an epigram for every dilemma.

» To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

» 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.

» 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.

» I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

» 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.

» 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.

» 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.

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

» 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.

» I have been no more than a medium, as it were.

» 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.

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

» This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

» To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

» Every artist writes his own autobiography.

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

» The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

» 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.

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

» Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

» Books are not men and yet they stay alive.

» If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

» A picture is a poem without words.

» Composers shouldn't think too much - it interferes with their plagiarism.

» Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

» Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

» A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

» Every good painter paints what he is.

» My painting does not come from the easel.

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

» Things are beautiful if you love them.

» 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.

» Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.

» The most profound things are inexpressible.

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

» The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.

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

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

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

» The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

» The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.

» Personality is everything in art and poetry.

» Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than looking.

» In art the best is good enough.

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

» Writing is like walking in a deserted street. Out of the dust in the street you make a mud pie.

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

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

» All books are divisible into two classes, the books of the hour, and the books of all time.

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

» 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.

» Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

» Words are often seen hunting for an idea, but ideas are never seen hunting for words.

» About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

» 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.

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

» Art is subject to arbitrary fashion.

» You don't know how much artists go through to make it look so easy. It's all in the practice.

» 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.

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

» Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

» Women artists need to break barriers in order for women's experience to be valuable.

» 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.

» All art is but imitation of nature.

» The way is long if one follows precepts, but short... if one follows patterns.

» I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.

» A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.

» 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.

» Great art picks up where nature ends.

» 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.

» 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.

» The perfection of art is to conceal art.

» Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.

» Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

» Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

» 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.

» Are you really sure that a floor can't also be a ceiling?

» Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check.

» We adore chaos because we love to produce order.

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

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

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

» Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

» My trade and art is to live.

» 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.

» People of art should never get married and have children, because it's a selfish experience.

» A picture is worth a thousand words.

» Imagination rules the world.

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

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

» Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.

» I'm a study of a man in chaos in search of frenzy.

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

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

» It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

» A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

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

» All art is quite useless.

» Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

» 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.

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

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

» Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

» Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.

» 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.

» Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

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

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

» We live in a rainbow of chaos.

» 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.

» The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

» 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.

» Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

» There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

» 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.

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

» 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.

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

» 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?

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

» Every artist was first an amateur.

» In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

» Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors.

» Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

» Genius always finds itself a century too early.

» Pictures must not be too picturesque.

» Movies were very important. The art-form of the 20th century.

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

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

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

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

» Art doesn't transform. It just plain forms.

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

» Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

» 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.

» The history of art is the history of revivals.

» Words are but the signs of ideas.

» I have a love-hate relationship with performing.

» 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.

» Trying to force creativity is never good.

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

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

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

» My hand is the extension of the thinking process - the creative process.

» Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

» Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

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

» Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

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

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

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

» 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.

» It is difficult to make political art work.

» Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.

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

» To love beauty is to see light.

» If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

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

» 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.

» 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.

» You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

» 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.

» Rules and models destroy genius and art.

» Literature flourishes best when it is half trade and half an art.

» The object of art is to give life a shape.

» Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

» Art is science made clear.

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

» Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

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