Quotes about art

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“The art of conversation is the art of hearing as well as of being heard.”

“Life is a shitstorm, in which art is our only umbrella."
(spoken by character in a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa)”

“Art should be a place of hope.”

“Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.”

“If it weren't for greed, intolerance, hate, passion and murder, you would have no works of art, no great buildings, no medical science, no Mozart, no Van Gough, no Muppets and no Louis Armstrong.”

“Scapegrace leaped up. “I am the Killer Supreme! I make
murder into an art form!”
Skulduggery hit him again and Scapegrace did a little twirl
before falling.”

“Art’s something you choose to make … it’s a bringing together of … of everything around you into something that makes you more human, more khepri, whatever. More of a person.”

“A fine work of art - music, dance, painting, story - has the power to silence the chatter in the mind and lift us to another place.”

“Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.”

“Silence isn't golden and it surely doesn't mean consent, so start practicing the art of communication.”

“I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.”

“You know how the tightrope guy at the circus wants everyone to believe his act is an art, but deep down you can see that he's really just hoping he makes it all the way across?”

“It is necessary to meditate early, and often, on the art of dying to succeed later in doing it properly just once.”

“A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.”

“Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”

“Art—the meaning of the pattern of our common actions in reality. The cloth-of-gold that hides behind the sackcloth of reality, forced out by the pain of human memory.”

“Should God create another Eve, and I
Another Rib afford, yet loss of thee
Would never from my heart; no no, I feel
The Link of Nature draw me: Flesh of Flesh,
Bone of my Bone thou art, and from thy State
Mine never shall be parted, bliss or woe.”

“History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created.”

“All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet — it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.”

“The art of being a warrior is to balance the wonder and the terror of being alive.”

“The end of art is peace.”

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”

“Resolve, and thou art free.”

“It's hard not to respond when a master of the art of kissing is laying one on you.”

“Art is an explosion.”

“The best art always comes unbidden.”

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.”

“All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.”

“A good half of the art of living is resilience.”

“Jamie, I had found out by accident a few days previously, had never mastered the art of winking one eye. Instead, he blinked solemnly, like a large red owl.”

“An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.”

“Art is science made clear.”

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”

“The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution!”

“Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.”

“The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings.”

“Life is the art of being well-deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.”

“The task of art is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all of these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory. That is our duty. If we don’t fulfill it, we feel unhappy.”

“Truth has been relegated to subjectivity; beauty has been subjugated to the beholder; and as millions are idiotized night after night, a global commune has been constructed with the arts enjoying a totalitarian rule.”

“don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.”

“There is no art without contemplation.”

“Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's individual value-judgments.”

“We need our Arts to teach us how to breathe”

“Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself.”

“I didn't know the inner me was hungry," I said to Art.
"That's because it already starved to death.”

“Anyone who reads a book with a sense of obligation does not understand the art of reading.”

“Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.”

“… sometimes we enter art to hide within it. It is where we can go to save ourselves, where a third-person voice protects us.”

“Be kind to dragons, for thou art crunchy when toasted and taste good with ketchup. (Sebastian)”

“We try not to encourage demonstrations of his mastery of the gaseous arts.”

“There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry- architecture being perhaps the least banal derivative of the latter.”

“Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.”

“It's not art for art's sake, it's art for my sake.”

“Contemporary art hates you.”

“I do not know anything about Art with a capital A. What I do know about is my art. Because it concerns me. I do not speak for others. So I do not speak for things which profess to speak for others. My art, however, speaks for me. It lights my way.”

“Thou art coming to a King, large petitions with thee bring, for His grace and power are such none can ever ask too much.”

“God must not engage in theology. The writer must not destroy by human reasonings the faith that art requires of us.”

“… art is made by the alone for the alone… The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication…”

“Strategy is a commodity, execution is an art.”

“… A strange art – music – the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.”

“Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.”

“Vision is the Art of seeing Things invisible.”

“I love thee and thou art so lovely and so wonderful and so beautiful and it does such things to me to be with thee that I feel as though I wanted to die when I am loving thee.”

“To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,
To raise the genius, and to mend the heart;
To make mankind, in conscious virtue bold,
Live o'er each scene, and be what they behold:
For this the Tragic Muse first trod the stage.”

“So therefore I dedicate myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger because I cannot dedicate myself to any fellow being.”

“Philosophy? What good is that?” Isn’t it the art of saying nothing with as many words as possible?”

“Advice for a human

86. To like something is to insult it. Love it or hate it. Be passionate. As civilisation advances, so does indifference. It is a disease. Immunize yourself with art. And love.”

“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”

“Art begins… when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.”

“But no artist, I now realize, can be satisfied with art alone. There is a natural craving for recognition which cannot be gain-said.”

“Later he would say that the Church led him to God, and LSD led him to universe. He also said that art led him to the devil, and sex kept him with the devil.”

“Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.”

“The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest.”

“Just like any woman,… we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same.”

“Art has always been the raft onto which we climb to save our sanity. I don't see a different purpose for it now.”

“When life sucks, throw yourself into art.”

“Like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.”

“Life is serious but art is fun!”

“I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.”

“I do not want art for a few, any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.”

“Look," said Janet, irritated, "if the thing you liked best to do in the world was read, and somebody offered to pay you room and board and give you a liberal arts degree if you would just read for four years, wouldn't you do it?”

“A paradox: The things you don’t need to live—books, art, cinema, wine, and so on—are the things you need to live.”

“When nations grow old, the Arts grow cold,
And Commerce settles on every tree.”

“How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.”

“Thou art a little soul bearing about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say.”

“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes – ah, that is where the art resides.”

“Home is where the heart is, home is where the fart is.
Come let us fart in the home.
There is no art in a fart.
Still a fart may not be artless.
Let us fart and artless fart in the home.”

“Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory —
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.”

“I like living, breathing better than working… my art is that of living. Each second, each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere, which is neither visual nor cerebral, it's a sort of constant euphoria.”

“Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.”

“Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.”

“The art of reading is to skip judiciously.”

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

“Philosophy, art, and science are not the mental objects of an objectified brain but the three aspects under which the brain becomes subject.”

“The true work of art
is but a shadow of the divine perfection”

“Good art however "immoral" is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can not be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.”

“In a world of lies and liars, an honest work of art is always an act of social responsibility.”

“Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.”

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves.”