Art quotes and words of wisdom

"A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous."
Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe


"A fine artist is one who makes familiar things new and new things familiar."
Louis Nizer


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


"A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What one can be, one must be."
Abraham H. Maslow


"A painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen."
Paul Valery


"A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world."
Edmond De Goncourt


"A painting is never finished?it simply stops in interesting places."
Paul Gardner


"A story is told that Whistler once painted a tiny picture of a spray of roses. The artistry involved in the picture was magnificent. Never before, it seemed, had the art of man been able to execute quite so deftly a reproduction of the art of nature. The picture was the envy of the artists who saw it, the despair of the collectors who yearned to buy it. But Whistler refused steadfastly to sell it. "For," he said, "whenever I feel that my hand has lost its cunning, whenever I doubt my ability, I look at the little picture of the spray of roses, and say to myself, ?Whistler, you painted that. Your hand drew it. Your imagination conceived the colors. Your skill put the roses on the canvas.? Then, said he, "I know that what I have done, I can do again""
Sterling W. Sill


"A work of art has an author and yet, when it is perfect, it has something which is anonymous about it."
Simone Weil


"Above all, we are coming to understand that the arts incarnate the creativity of a free people. When the creative impulse cannot flourish, when it cannot freely select its methods and objects, when it is deprived of spontaneity, then society severs the root of art."
John Fitzgerald Kennedy


"Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered."
Alfred Gerald "Al" Capp


"Actually, my artistic knowledge is so tiny it could fit into the brain of an art critic."
Michael Kilian


"All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster"s autobiography."
Federico Fellini


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


"All art requires courage."
Anne Tucker


"All profoundly original work looks ugly at first."
Clement Greenberg


"An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one."
Charles Horton Cooley


"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


"And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art..."
Albrecht Dürer


"Any great work of art ... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world ? the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air."
Leonard Bernstein


"Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike."
Margot Fonteyn


"Are you really sure that a floor can"t also be a ceiling?"
M. C. Escher


"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 to it."
Marshall McLuhan


"Art can only be truly Art by presenting an adequate outward symbol of some fact in the interior life."
Margaret Sarah Fuller


"Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass."
Walter Pater


"Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning."
Jacques Barzun


"Art happens - no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about."
James Abbott McNeill Whistler


"Art hath an enemy called Ignorance."
Ben Jonson


"Art imitates Nature, and necessity is the mother of invention."
Richard Franck


"Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does, the better."
André Gide


"Art is a man"s nature; nature is God"s art."
Bailey


"Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed."
Kahlil Gibran


"Art is an attempt to integrate evil."
Simone de Beauvoir


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


"Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don"t want it."
Anthony Burgess


"Art is either a plagiarist or a revolutionary."
Paul Gaugin


"Art is frozen Zen"
Reginald Horace Blyth


"Art is long, life is short. ?Ars longa, vita brevis"
Hippocrates


"Art is making something out of nothing and selling it."
Francis Vincent "Frank" Zappa, Jr.


"Art is more godlike than science. Science discovers; art creates."
John Opie


"Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting."
Elizabeth Bowen


"Art is running away without ever leaving home."
Twyla Tharp


"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


"Art is the objectification of feeling and the subjectification of nature."
Suzanne Langer


"Art is the proper task of life."
Friedrich Nietzsche


"Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men."
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller


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


"Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers and never succeeding."
Marc Chagall


"Art is... a question mark in the minds of those who want to know what"s happening."
Aaron Howard


"Art my slats! I can paint with a shoestring dipped in lard!"
George Luks


"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


"Art to me was a state: it didn"t need to be an accomplishment."
Margaret C. Anderson


"Art, like morality, consists in drawing a line somewhere."
Gilbert Keith Chesterton


"But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: "It?s clever, but is it Art?""
Rudyard Kipling


"By the time the child can draw more that scribble, by the age of four or five years, an already well-formed body of conceptual knowledge formulated in language dominates his memory and controls his graphic work. Drawings are graphic accounts of essentially verbal processes. As an essentially verbal education gains control, the child abandons his graphic efforts and relies almost entirely on words. Language has first spoilt drawing and then swallowed it up completely."
Karl Buhler


"Colors that blend with the brick and the dark waters of the city"s canals - greens, browns and the strong shade of oxblood that is known as Bruges red."
Vicky Elliott


"Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures."
Henry Ward Beecher


"Every artist writes his own autobiography."
Henry Havelock Ellis


"Every man"s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself."
Samuel Butler, the Younger


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


"Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art."
Will Durant


"Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend."
John Singer Sargent


"Fine art and pizza delivery: what we do falls neatly in between."
David Letterman


"For Art is Nature made by man To Man the interpreter of God."
Owen Meredith


"For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh."
Georges Rouault


"For the mystic what is how. For the craftsman how is what. For the artist what and how are one."
William McElcheran


"God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant, and the ant. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things."
Pablo Picasso


"Good art is not what it looks like, but what it does to us."
Roy Adzak


"Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness."
George Jean Nathan


"Great art presupposes the alert mind of the educated listener."
Arnold Schoenberg


"Great artists need great clients."
I. M. Pei


"He is the greatest artist who has embodied, in the sum of his works, the greatest number of the greatest ideas."
John Ruskin


"I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum."
Claes Oldenburg


"I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don"t need."
Francois-Auguste Rodin


"I cry out for order and find it only in art."
Helen Hayes


"I didn"t have any interest in traditional art."
Cindy Sherman


"I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the subject grow to look like his portrait."
Salvador Dali


"I don"t believe in art. I believe in artists."
Marcel Duchamp


"I don"t mind being miserable as long as I"m painting well."
Grace Hartigan


"I don"t need the money, dear. I work for art."
Maria Callas


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


"I paint with shapes."
Alexander Calder


"I passionately hate the idea of being "with it," I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time."
Orson Welles


"I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers."
Claude Monet


"I thank God for my handicaps, for, through them, I have found myself, my work, and my God."
Helen Adams Keller


"I"m not a driven businessman, but a driven artist. I never think about money. Beautiful things make money."
Lord Acton


"If I had been around when Rubens was painting, I would have been revered as a fabulous model. Kate Moss? Well, she would have been the paintbrush."
Dawn French


"If I hadn"t started painting, I would have raised chickens."
Grandma Moses


"If people knew how hard I have had to work to gain my mastery, it wouldn"t seem wonderful at all."
Michelangelo Buonarroti


"If people knew how hard I have to work to gain my mastery it wouldn"t seem wonderful at all."
Michelangelo


"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


"If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you. It may break your heart but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right."
Maxwell Anderson


"Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal."
Lionel Trilling


"In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Bach fugue, or any other great work of art."
Edward O. Wilson


"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


"In painting you must give the idea of the true by means of the false."
Hilaire Germain Edgar Degas


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


"It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors."
Oscar Wilde


"Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one."
Stella Adler


"Life is the art of drawing without an eraser."
Unknown


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


"Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television."
Rita Mae Brown


"Music washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."
Berthold Auerbach


"Nature is the art of God."
Dante Alighieri


"No great advance has ever been made in science, politics, or religion, without controversy."
Lyman Beecher


"Nothing is so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject."
George Santayana


"Of all lies, art is the least untrue."
Gustave Flaubert


"Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees."
Marcel Proust


"Painting is easy when you don"t know how, but very difficult when you do."
Edgar Degas


"Painting is possessed of a divine power, for not only ... does it make the absent present, but it also, after many centuries, makes the dead almost alive, so that they are recognized with great admiration ..."
Leon Battista Alberti


"PAINTING, n. The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic."
Ambrose Gwinett Bierce


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


"Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin."
General Dwight David Eisenhower


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


"Portraits are supposed to "look within," but in my opinion very few people have an interior significantly different from the outside portrait."
Jon Witcomb


"Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral."
Frank Lloyd Wright


"Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness."
Percy Wynham Lewis


"Science and art belong to the whole world, and the barriers of nationality vanish before them."
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe


"Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change ? only to give stability to one beautiful moment."
George Eliot


"So-called art restoration is at least as tricky as brain surgery. Most pictures expire under scalpel and sponge."
Alexander Eliot


"Strong and convincing art has never arisen from theories."
Mary Wigman


"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."



"That is what the title of artist means: one who perceives more than his fellows, and who records more than he has seen."
Edward Gordon Craig


"That which is static and repetitive is boring. That which is dynamic and random is confusing. In between lies art."
John Locke


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


"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


"The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds."
Jawaharlal Nehru


"The art of love... is largely the art of persistence."
Albert Ellis


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


"The artist has one function-to affirm and glorify life."
W. Edward Brown


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


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


"The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation."
François Auguste René Rodin


"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


"The artist should be a seeing-eye dog for a myopic civilization."
Jacob Getlar Smith


"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


"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


"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


"The course of Nature is the art of God."
Edward Young


"The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness."
Max Eastman


"The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure."
Dale Carnegie


"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."
Aldous Huxley


"The great artist is the simplifier."
Henri Frédéric Amiel


"The great artists of the world are never Puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable."
Henry Louis Mencken


"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


"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."
Francis Bacon


"The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you"re an artist."
David Hockney


"The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract."
Ellen Key


"The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation."
Hilton Kramer


"The most awkward means are adequate to the communication of authentic experience, and the finest words no compensation for lack of it. It is for this reason that we are moved by the true Primitives and that the most accomplished art craftsmanship leaves us cold."
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy


"The painter should not paint what he sees, but what will be seen."
Paul Klee


"The Paleolithic hunters who painted the unsurpassed animal murals on the ceiling of the cave at Altamira had only rudimentary tools. Art is older than production for use, and play older than work. Man was shaped less by what he had to do than by what he did in playful moments. It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities."
Eric Hoffer


"The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one."
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov


"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers."
James Baldwin


"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


"The Science of Government it is my duty to study, more than all other Sciences: the Art of Legislation and Administration and Negotiation, ought to take place, indeed to exclude in a manner all other Arts.?I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematics and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematics and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine. This letter has not been dated precisely, but appears to have been written after Adams"s letter to his wife on May 12, and before one written to her on May 15."
John Adams


"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


"The studio, a room to which the artist consigns himself for life, is naturally important, not only as workplace, but as a source of inspiration. And it usually manages, one way or another, to turn up in his product."
Grace Glueck


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


"The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living as seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art."
George Bernard Shaw


"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


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


"Treat a work of art like a prince: let it speak to you first."
Arthur Schopenhauer


"True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation."
Thomas Bailey Aldrich


"True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learn"d to dance. "T is not enough no harshness gives offence,? The sound must seem an echo to the sense."
Alexander Pope


"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


"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


"What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art."
Augustus Saint-Gaudens


"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


"What is art? It is not just nature, it is nurtured nature. It is intelligence applied to what physical ability you have."
Rudolph Hametovich Nureyev


"What is art? Nature concentrated."
Honoré de Balzac


"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 artwork is involved, it"s almost assumed that it"s going to travel. It"s too hot to stay here."
Gregory Miller


"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 Michelangelo finished the painting of the Sistine Chapel"s ceiling, he spent the rest of his life trying to remove the paint that had poured into his sleeve."
Francois Cavanna


"When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?""
Howard Ikemoto


"When one buys some of my artwork I hope it is because they will wish to learn from it and not because they think it will match their drapes!"
Christian Cardell Corbet


"Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art."
Leonardo da Vinci


"Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science."
Albert Einstein


"Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier."
Marie Laurencin


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


"Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse."
Sir Winston Churchill


"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."
Edward Morgan "E. M." Forster


Interesting Quotes

He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to. It is the means that determines the end.Harry Emerson Fosdick - US clergyman (1878 - 1969)

Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution.Henry Louis Mencken