Quotes about art
page 4

“As far as I can tell, the only thing worth looking at in most museums of art is all the schoolgirls on day trips with the art department.”

Banksy pseudonymous England-based graffiti artist, political activist, and painter

Existencilism (2002)

“The greatest achievement of humanity is not its works of art, science, or technology, but the recognition of its own dysfunction.”

Eckhart Tolle (1948) German writer

Science

“It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

The Critic as Artist (1891), Part II

Perfection

“true apothecary thy drugs art quick”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

“For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

“Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.”

Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964) American novelist, short story writer

“The Guide says there is an art to flying", said Ford, "or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”

Douglas Adams Life, the Universe and Everything

Source: Life, the Universe and Everything

Learning, Flying

“What is art? (…) Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life—love and sacrifice.”

Andrei Tarkovsky (1932–1986) Soviet and Russian film-maker, writer, film editor, film theorist, theatre and opera director

Love, Life, Dependency

“I realized that the longing for art, like the longing for love, is a malady that blinds us, and makes us forget the things we already know, obscuring reality.”

Orhan Pamuk book The Museum of Innocence

Source: The Museum of Innocence

Love, Reality, Forgetting

“Behind every work of art lies an uncommitted crime”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

“All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

“It comforted him because it could not be called suffering if it was a sign of Art.”

Hermann Bahr (1863–1934) austrian dramatic, publicist and writer

Suffering

“Magic is the art of thinking, not strength or language.”

Christopher Paolini book Eldest

Source: Eldest

Thinking

“Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Life, Drink, Water

“Reality is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality having nothing to do with the average "reality" perceived by the communal eye.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Pale Fire

Source: Pale Fire

Communication, Reality

“Works of art are of an infinite solitude, and no means of approach is so useless as criticism. Only love can touch and hold them and be fair to them.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Love, Solitude

“Every work of art is aggressive, Isabella. And every artist's life is a small war or a large one, beginning with oneself and one's limitations. To achieve anything you must first have ambition and then talent, knowledge, and finally the opportunity.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Angel's Game

Source: The Angel's Game

Life, War, Knowledge

“A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter One (17 February 1903)
Source: Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

“The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

People, Business

“Acquire the art of detachment, the virtue of method, and the quality of thoroughness, but above all the grace of humility.”

William Osler (1849–1919) Canadian pathologist, physician, educator, bibliophile, historian, author, cofounder of Johns Hopkins Hospi…

As quoted in The Book of Unusual Quotations (1957) by Rudolf Franz Flesch, p. 122.

“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist palette which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

Love, Life, Color

“I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) French-Occitanian poet, playwright, actor and theatre director

Source: The Theater and Its Double

Life

“Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.”

Donald Ervin Knuth Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

Foreword to the book A=B http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~wilf/AeqB.html (1996) Source: Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

Understanding, Science

“If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I'll say it.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Music

“The art of avoiding extremes is an art that is drawn on the canvas of maturity and painted with the abstract strokes of many experiences.”

T.D. Jakes (1957) American bishop

Source: The Lady, Her Lover, and Her Lord

Painting

“Spontaneity is a meticulously prepared art”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

“Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Music, Tear, Memory

“This is Art holding a Mirror up to Life. That’s why everything is exactly the wrong way around.”

Terry Pratchett book Wyrd Sisters

Source: Wyrd Sisters

Life, Way

“At the heart of all great art is an essential melancholy.”

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director

Heart

“Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment in recognition of the pattern.”

Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) English mathematician and philosopher

Source: Attributed from posthumous publications, Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead (1954), Ch. 29, June 10, 1943.

“‎All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

Life, Moving On

“I have heard it said that a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Source: Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

Life, Childhood

“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

1940s–present, A Mencken Chrestomathy (1949)
Source: A Mencken Chrestomathy

Democracy, Science

“All art is quite useless.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray
Variant: All art is immoral.

“All we have, it seems to me, is the beauty of art and nature and life, and the love which that beauty inspires.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

“Fire Lookout: Numa Ridge”, p. 57
The Journey Home (1977)
Source: The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West

Love, Life, Beauty, Nature

“Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Drawing

“We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.

All art is quite useless.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Forgiveness

“The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.”

Oscar Wilde book The Picture of Dorian Gray

Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray

Beauty

“Art too is just a way of living, and however one lives, one can, without knowing, prepare for it; in everything real one is closer to it, more its neighbor, than in the unreal half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend to be close to art, in practice deny and attack the existence of all art - as, for example, all of journalism does and almost all criticism and three quarters of what is called (and wants to be called) literature.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book Letters to a Young Poet

Letter Ten (26 December 1908)
Letters to a Young Poet (1934)

Way, Literature

“For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.”

William Shakespeare book Shakespeare's Sonnets

Source: Shakespeare's Sonnets

Hell, Night

“Now let it work. Mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt.”

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Source: Julius Caesar

“I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hesse, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter. In some way, in some form, my God was always there, but now I have learned to talk to him.”

Eric Clapton (1945) English musician, singer, songwriter, and guitarist

God, Music, Way, Learning

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

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Life, Soul

“Thou art a boil, a plague sore, an embossed carbuncle in my corrupted blood.”

William Shakespeare King Lear

Source: King Lear

“The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.”

Theodor W. Adorno book Aesthetic Theory

Source: Aesthetic Theory

World

“Art calls for complete mastery of techniques, developed by reflection within the soul.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

Soul

“.— A person must have one or the other. Either a cheerful disposition by nature, or a disposition made cheerful by art and knowledge.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Human, All Too Human

Source: Human, All Too Human

Nature, Knowledge, Personality

“Thou art of the Jungle and not of the Jungle. And I am only a black panther. But I love thee, Little Brother.”

Rudyard Kipling book The Jungle Book

Source: The Jungle Book

Love

“So many gods, so many creeds;
So many paths that wind and wind,
While just the art of being kind
Is all the sad world needs.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) American author and poet

The World's Need
Poetry quotes

God, World, Sadness

“Admiration for a quality or an art can be so strong that it deters us from striving to possess it.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Strong

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary. It's time for that to end.”

Sebastian Junger (1962) American author, journalist and documentarian

Source: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

People, Feeling, Time, Perfection

“On this earth of ours where everything is subject to the passing of time, one thing only is both subject to time and yet victorious over it: the work of art.”

André Malraux (1901–1976) French novelist, art theorist and politician

André Malraux, TV program: Promenades imaginaires dans Florence, 1975.

Time, Victory

“Art only begins where Imitation ends.”

Oscar Wilde book De Profundis

Source: De Profundis

“Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

posthumous quotes, The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas', (1961)

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

Oscar Wilde book The Soul of Man under Socialism

Source: The Soul of Man Under Socialism

World

“What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?”

Robert Hughes (1938–2012) Australian critic, historian, writer

Source: The Shock of the New

Change

“Those who still think that listening isn’t an art should see if they can do it half as well.”

Michael Ende book Momo

Source: Momo

Thinking

“How art thou out of breath when thou hast breath
To say to me that thou art out of breath?”

William Shakespeare book Romeo and Juliet

Source: Romeo and Juliet

“Principles for the Development of a Complete Mind: Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses- especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Sense, Study, Learning, Science

“To [aunt] Marie Hill,
Dearest
Why do you tempt me? I really cannot. It's impossible! Be happy? The only thought I have in my mind is to immerse myself in my art, to merge completely with it until I can begin to express what I really feel – and after that to be consumed even more by it. Even if I wanted to, I could not leave here [Worpswede]… I want to live here. I want to 'live' – and develop further as a person and as an artist… Can you understand this? I think you can. And do you approve? I hope so. In any case, I can't do any different..”

Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876–1907) German artist

In a letter to her aunt Mary Hill, from Worpswede, June 1899; as quoted in Paula Modersohn-Becker – The Letters and Journals, ed: Günther Busch & Lotten von Reinken; (transl, A. Wensinger & C. Hoey; Taplinger); Publishing Company, New York, 1983, p. 135
1899

Happiness, Hope, Feeling, Understanding

“After Herberholz had shown me all sorts of techniques, I suddenly got very interested in etching. I had a lot to say, I had a subject. Wash off the acid, put on the aquatint: a wonderful technique that you can use to get as many different shades and tones as you want. The 'doing' aspect of art becomes tremendously interesting when you start doing etchings; you get to be a real alchemist.”

Otto Dix (1891–1969) German painter and printmaker

Otto Dix quoted by Eva Karcher, in Otto Dix, New York: Crown Publishers, 1987, p. 22; as cited by Roy Forward, in 'Education resource material: beauty, truth and goodness in Dix's War' https://nga.gov.au/dix/edu.pdf, p. 10

“You request me to tell you…if it is true that the creed of all who profess to love high and serious art is: "There is no God but Bach, and Mendelssohn is his prophet?"”

Hector Berlioz Mémoires

Vous me priez de vous dire…S'il est vrai que l'acte de foi de tout ce qui prétend aimer l'art élevé et sérieux soit celui-ci : "Il n'y a pas d'autre Dieu que Bach, et Mendelssohn est son prophète"?
"Premier Voyage en Allemagne", Quatrième lettre, p. 285
Mémoires (1870)

Love, God

“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term "Art," I should call it "the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul." The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of "Artist".”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

Marginalia http://www.easylit.com/poe/comtext/prose/margin.shtml (November 1844)

Soul, Nature, Sense

“The concrete man has but one interest — to be right. That to him is the art of all arts, and all means are fair which help him to it.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

1880s, The Sentiment of Rationality (1882)

Help

“I was already almost 30, and by then everyone was talking about the Americans. Picasso was irrelevant. He was history. I found myself in this deep pool, and there were all these figures swimming around, like Rauschenberg and Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein|Lichtenstein]]. I wanted to go where they were. Seeing Pollock and Fontana in Kassel had given me a sense of what it meant to be a modern artist and take risks, but it was a distant admiration because they were a different generation. This was my generation”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

on the art academy in Düsseldorf
after 2000, Gerhard Richter: An Artist Beyond Isms' (2002)

History, Sense, Distant

“I'm very sorry to inconvenience you [ the art dealers G. and J. Berheim-Jeune ], but I find it impossible to supply you with any more Venice pictures. It was useless trying to persuade my self otherwise, the work that's left is too poor for exhibition. Don't insist... I've enough good sense in me to know whether what I'm doing is good or bad, and it' utterly bad, and I can't believe that people of taste, if they have any knowledge at all, could see any value in it. Things have been dragging on like this for far too long..”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

Quote in Monet's letter to his art-dealers [[wBernheim-Jeune|G. and J. Berheim-Jeune], Venice, 1912; as cited in: K.E. Sullivan. Monet: Discovering Art, Brockhampton press, London (2004), p. 72
1900 - 1920

People, Knowledge, Sense

“Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship … To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privileges to others will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic and have no place in a republic … The Constitution of this republic should make the special privilege for medical freedom as well as religious freedom.”

Benjamin Rush (1745–1813) American physician, educator, author

As quoted by Terry Dorian, Total Health and Restoration: A 180-Day Journey (2002), p. 49. Other versions include: [The] Constitution of this republic should make special provisions for medical freedom as well as religious freedom ... To restrict the art of healing to one class of men and deny equal privilege to another will constitute the Bastille of medical science. All such laws are un-American and despotic. They are fragments of monarchy and have no place in a republic. [in Robert L. Schwartz, "Laetrile: The Battle Moves into the Courtroom," American Bar Association Journal, February 1979, p. 226, no citation given] Unless we put medical freedom into the constitution the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship and force people who wish doctors and treatment of their own choice to submit to only what the dictating outfit offers. Laws restricting the practice of the healing art to one class of physicians and denying equal privileges to others, constitutes the Bastilles of Medicine, for they prevent progress. They are relics of Monarchy, and therefore have no place in a Republic. [in Thomas Morgan, "National Board of Health. The Other Side of the Question, As It Appears to Thomas Morgan," Youngstown Vindicator, 27 January 1911, p. 6] This quote is often cited with regards to Rush, and can rarely be found attributed to his autobiography, but does not exist in that book http://books.google.com/books?id=EkTM9Kn9F4IC&q=%22into+the+constitution%22#v=onepage&q=%22into%20the%20constitution%22&f=false http://hpy.sagepub.com/content/16/1/89.abstract. The quote contains words and phrasing that seem anachronistic to late 18th century America. Misattributed

Men, Law, Freedom, Science

“The new hero-type favored by Aschenbach, and recurring in his books in a multiplicity of individual variants, had already been remarked upon at an early stage by a shrewd commentator, who had described his conception as that of “an intellectual and boyish manly virtue, that of a youth who clenches his teeth in proud shame and stands calmly on as the swords and spears pass through his body … the figure of Saint Sebastian is the most perfect symbol if not of art in general, then certainly of the kind of art in question.”

Thomas Mann book Death in Venice

Source: Death in Venice (1912), Ch. 2, as translated by David Luke

Books, Youth, Question, Perfection

“It is to be observed throughout Mr. Burke's book that he never speaks of plots against the Revolution; and it is from those plots that all the mischiefs have arisen. It suits his purpose to exhibit the consequences without their causes. It is one of the arts of the drama to do so. If the crimes of men were exhibited with their sufferings, stage effect would sometimes be lost, and the audience would be inclined to approve where it was intended they should commiserate.”

Thomas Paine book Rights of Man

Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)

Men, Books, Suffering

“The people who have discovered something important in any of the more noble arts have principally done so when they have abandoned the body and taken refuge in the citadel of the soul.”

Marsilio Ficino book Platonic Theology

Platonic Theology, Book 13, Chapter 2

People, Soul

“However—the crucial thing is my lack of interest in ordinary life. No one ever wrote a story yet without some real emotional drive behind it—and I have not that drive except where violations of the natural order… defiances and evasions of time, space, and cosmic law… are concerned. Just why this is so I haven't the slightest idea—it simply is so. I am interested only in broad pageants—historic streams—orders of biological, chemical, physical, and astronomical organisation—and the only conflict which has any deep emotional significance to me is that of the principle of freedom or irregularity or adventurous opportunity against the eternal and maddening rigidity of cosmic law… especially the laws of time…. Hence the type of thing I try to write. Naturally, I am aware that this forms a very limited special field so far as mankind en masse is concerned; but I believe (as pointed out in that Recluse article) that the field is an authentic one despite its subordinate nature. This protest against natural law, and tendency to weave visions of escape from orderly nature, are characteristic and eternal factors in human psychology, even though very small ones. They exist as permanent realities, and have always expressed themselves in a typical form of art from the earliest fireside folk tales and ballads to the latest achievements of Blackwood and Machen or de la Mare or Dunsany. That art exists—whether the majority like it or not. It is small and limited, but real—and there is no reason why its practitioners should be ashamed of it. Naturally one would rather be a broad artist with power to evoke beauty from every phase of experience—but when one unmistakably isn't such an artist, there's no sense in bluffing and faking and pretending that one is.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to E. Hoffmann Price (15 August 1934) , quoted in Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters edited by S.T. Joshi, p. 268
Non-Fiction, Letters, to E. Hoffmann Price

Life, Law, Beauty, Idea

“Art is the signature of civilizations.”

Beverly Sills (1929–2007) opera soprano

As quoted in The Beacon Book of Quotations by Women (1992) by Rosalie Maggio

“The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art.”

Joseph Kosuth (1945) American conceptual artist

Art after Philosophy, 1969

Question, Nature

“p>Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them - will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn't rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever. Good luck doesn't even fall in a fine drizzle, no matter how hard the nobodies summon it, even if their left hand is tickling, or if they begin the new day on their right foot, or start the new year with a change of brooms.The nobodies: nobody's children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be.
Who don't speak languages, but dialects.
Who don't have religions, but superstitions.
Who don't create art, but handicrafts.
Who don't have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”

Eduardo Galeano book The Book of Embraces

The Nobodies; Cied in Mother Jones Magazine (1991) The Book of Embraces. March-April 1991. p. 71
The Book of Embraces (1991)

Life, Children, World, Religion

“It was not until 1869 that I met him Manet again, but this time, we became friends immediately. From the first meeting, he invited me to join him every evening in a café of the 'Batignolles' where he and his friends would gather to talk at the end of a day spent at their studios. I would meet there, Fantin-Latour and Cézanne, Degas - who arrived shortly afterwards from Italy, the art critic Duranty, Emile Zola who was just starting-off in the literary world and a number of others. I would take Sisley, Bazille and Renoir. There was nothing more interesting than these discussions with their perpetual differences of opinion. Our mind and souls were stimulated... One would always leave, all the better immersed, the will stronger, our thinking more defined and clear.”

Claude Monet (1840–1926) French impressionist painter

in Claude Monet par lui-meme – interview by Thiébault-Sisson / translated by Louise McGlone Jacot-Descombes; published in Le Temps newspaper, 26 November 1900
about Édouard Manet, leading artist in Impressionism then, in Paris.
1900 - 1920

World, Soul, Thinking, Time

“Academic training in beauty is a sham. We have been deceived… The beauties of the Parthenon, Venuses, Nymphs, Narcissuses are so many lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

1930s, "Conversations avec Picasso," 1934–35
Source: Herschel Browning Chip (1968, p. 271), quoted in Chipp (1978, 266); As cited in: Constance Milbrath (1998), Patterns of Artistic Development in Children, p. 257.

Beauty, Training

“Why does almost everything seem to me like its own parody? Why must I think that almost all, no, all the methods and conventions of art today are good for parody only?”

Thomas Mann book Doctor Faustus

Source: Doctor Faustus (1947), Ch. 15

Thinking

“The academic mind, as we know, is sometimes capable of assuming an aggressive attitude. The official mind, on the contrary, is and has to be, expert in the art of self-defence.”

Ronald Fisher (1890–1962) English statistician, evolutionary biologist, geneticist, and eugenicist

Presidential Address to the First Indian Statistical Congress, 1938. Sankhya 4, 14-17.
1930s

“Management is a distinct process consisting of planning, organising, actuating and controlling; utilising in each both science and art, and followed in order to accomplish pre-determined objectives.”

George R. Terry (1909–1979)

As cited in: S.P. Singh (2003), Planning And Management For Rural Development, p. 8
Principles of Management, 1960
Variant: Management is a distinct process consisting of planning, organizing, actuating and controlling, performed to determine and accomplish the objectives by the use of people and resources.

Science

“Now, through my own infirmity I recover what he was to me: my opposite. Being naturally truthful, he did not see the point of these exaggerations, and was borne on by a natural sense of the fitting, was indeed a great master of the art of living so that he seems to have lived long, and to have spread calm round him, indifference one might almost say, certainly to his own advancement, save that he had also great compassion. […] We have no ceremonies, only private dirges and no conclusions, only violent sensations, each separate. Nothing that has been said meets our case. […] After a long lifetime, loosely, in a moment of revelation, I may lay hands on it, but now the idea breaks in my hand. Ideas break a thousand times for once that they globe themselves entire. […] I am yawning. I am glutted with sensations. I am exhausted with the strain and the long, long time — twenty-five minutes, half an hour — that I have held myself alone outside the machine.”

Virginia Woolf book The Waves

Bernard on Percival, section V
The Waves (1931)

Truth, Idea, Nature, Sense

“I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art.”

G. H. Hardy book A Mathematician's Apology

Source: A Mathematician's Apology (1941)

Mathematics

“I believed before that (journey to Italy in 1875)… that movement was the whole secret of this art, and I put my models into positions like those of Michael Angelo. But as I went on observing the free attitudes of my models I perceived that they possessed thèse naturally^ and that Michael Angelo had not preconceived them, but merely transcribed them according to the Personal inspiration of human beings moved by the need of action. I went to Rome to look for what may be found everywhere : the latent heroic in every natural movement.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 65

Secret, Nature, Personality

“Absolutely everything beloved and cherished of the bourgeoisie, the conservative, the cowardly, and the impotent — the State, family life, secular art and science — was consciously or unconsciously hostile to the religious idea, to the Church, whose innate tendency and permanent aim was the dissolution of all existing worldly orders, and the reconstitution of society after the model of the ideal, the communistic City of God.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Naphta in Ch. 7
The Magic Mountain (1924)

Life, God, Hostility, Family

“Psychology is in its infancy, as a science. I hope in the interests of Art, it will always remain so.”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Oscar Wilde, 1897, | Hart-Davis, ed., Letters of Wilde, p. 173 https://circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/handle/2429/19170/UBC_1974_A8%20S88.pdf

Hope, Science

“Art is the supreme task and the truly metaphysical activity in this life…”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

Diesen Ernsthaften diene zur Belehrung, dass ich von der Kunst als der höchsten Aufgabe und der eigentlich metaphysischen Thätigkeit dieses Lebens im Sinne des Mannes überzeugt bin, dem ich hier, als meinem erhabenen Vorkämpfer auf dieser Bahn, diese Schrift gewidmet haben will.
"Preface to Richard Wagner", p. 13
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

Life

“What was it that drove these thousands into the arms of his art — what but the blissfully sensuous, searing, sense-consuming, intoxicating, hypnotically caressing, heavily upholstered — in a word, the luxurious quality of his music?”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner (1933)

Music, Sense

“Dear William Shakespeare. I am a 14 year old and I’m queer like you. I’m learning art. I wanted to be a queer artist like Leonardo or Michaelangelo. But I like Francis Bacon best I read Alan Ginsberg, Rimbaud. I like Tchaikovsky, if I make films I will make them like Eisenstein, Murnau, Pasolini, Visconti. Love from Derek.”

Derek Jarman (1942–1994) British film director and artist

Letter to the Minister, 1992

Love, Learning, Reading

“But I fancy that I hear some (for there will never be wanting men who would rather be eloquent than good) saying "Why then is there so much art devoted to eloquence? Why have you given precepts on rhetorical coloring and the defense of difficult causes, and some even on the acknowledgment of guilt, unless, at times, the force and ingenuity of eloquence overpowers even truth itself? For a good man advocates only good causes, and truth itself supports them sufficiently without the aid of learning."”
Videor mihi audire quosdam (neque enim deerunt umquam qui diserti esse quam boni malint) illa dicentis: "Quid ergo tantum est artis in eloquentia? cur tu de coloribus et difficilium causarum defensione, nonnihil etiam de confessione locutus es, nisi aliquando vis ac facultas dicendi expugnat ipsam veritatem? Bonus enim vir non agit nisi bonas causas, eas porro etiam sine doctrina satis per se tuetur veritas ipsa."

Quintilian (35–96) ancient Roman rhetor

Book XII, Chapter I, 33; translation by Rev. John Selby Watson
De Institutione Oratoria (c. 95 AD)

Men, Truth, Color, Support

“I don't believe in Jewish art. There are Jewish artists, which means, artists who are born Jewish, but that does not mean that their work is Jewish art. (translation from Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek)”

Jozef Israëls (1824–1911) Dutch painter

version in Dutch (citaat van Israëls, in het Nederlands): Ik geloof niet in joodse kunst. Er zijn joodse kunstenaars, d.w.z. kunstenaars die joods geboren zijn, maar dat wil nog niet zeggen dat hun werk joodse kunst is.
Quote of Jozef Israëls, 9 July 1907, translated from his letter (written in German) to the committee of the Exhibition for Jewish Art in Berlin; as cited in Jozef Israëls, 1824 – 1911, ed. Dieuwertje Dekkers; Waanders, Zwolle 1999, p. 55
Jozef Israëls was Jewish himself, but refused to call his art Jewish as the Zionist movement liked to call it
Quotes of Jozef Israels, after 1900

“Once centenarian teacher who had the body of an adolescent told me he had studied martial arts. "Me, too," I answered. We were in Notre Dame, and he said, "Attack me." I put myself in a combat position, and he moved his left hand in such an incredibly beautiful way that while I looked at it, fascinated, he gave me a big slap. "Beauty is the most dangerous weapon," he warned. It took me a long time to understand. He used a secret Chinese practice, which consists of drawing a snake in the air with your hand to distract the enemy. And that is how beauty is: the most awful weapon.”

Alejandro Jodorowsky (1929) Filmmaker and comics writer

Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy (2010)

Secret, Beauty, Way, Understanding

“I don’t consider my own clothing to be outrageous… The truth is that people just don’t have the same references that I do. To me it’s very beautiful and it’s art, and to them it’s outrageous and crazy.”

Lady Gaga (1986) American singer, songwriter, and actress

Lady Gaga, in V Magazine http://www.vmagazine.com/fashion_article.php?n=13327.

People, Truth, Beauty, Clothes

“1953. Learn the art of Silence; the wise Man that holds his Tongue, says more than the Fool who speaks.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727)

Fools, Silence, Learning

“Neo-Plasticism has its roots in Cubism. It could just as easy be called the Painting of Real Abstraction. Since the abstract can be expressed by a plastic reality... It achieves what all painting has tried to achieve but has been able to express only in a veiled manner. By their position and their dimension as well as by the importance of given to colour, the coloured planes express in a plastic way only relations and not forms. Neo-Plasticism imparts to these relations an aesthetic balance and thereby expresses universal harmony... For the moment what art had discovered must still be limited to art itself. Our environment cannot yet be realized as a creation of pure harmony. Art today is at the very point formerly occupied by religion. In its deepest meaning art was the transposition of the natural [into another plane]; in practice it always sought to achieve harmony between man and untransposed nature. Generally speaking, so do Theosophy and Anthroposophy, although these already possessed the original symbol of balance. And this is why they never were able to achieve equivalent relations, that is to say true harmony.”

Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) Peintre Néerlandais

Quote in Mondrian's letter to Rudolf Steiner, c. 1921-23; as cited in Abstract Painting, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co 1964, p. 83-85
1920's

Religion, Way, Nature, Reality

“I say it speeds thee not
That Christ rose from the grave,
So long as thou art still
To death and sin a slave.”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

The Cherubinic Wanderer

Death, Christ, Speed

“Be grateful even for hardship, setbacks, and bad people. Dealing with such obstacles is an essential part of training in the Art of Peace.”

Morihei Ueshiba (1883–1969) founder of aikido

The Art of Peace (1992)

People, Peace, Parting, Training

“The straight line is godless and immoral.”

Friedensreich Hundertwasser (1928–2000) Austrian artist

Mould Manifesto against Rationalism in Architecture (1958)

“Most Illustrious Lord and My Lord, I received the other day, with due reverence your Lordship's letter, together with the canvas and framing. Having read and noted the contents, I considered them so pretty and ingenious as to require no improvement of any kind; and the more I thought over it the more I became convinced that the greatness of art amongst the ancients was due to the assistance they received from great princes content to leave to the painters the credit and renown derived from their own ingenuity in bespeaking pictures. Can I therefore doubt that, if God enables me to satisfy in any part the wishes of Your Lordship, I shall have all credit for my labour? Yet I shall, after all have done no more than give shape to that which received its spirit — the most essential part — from Your Excellency.”

Titian (1488–1576) Italian painter

In a letter to the Duke Alfonso of Ferrara, From Venice, April 1, 1518; as quoted by J.A.Y. Crowe & G.B. Cavalcaselle in Titian his life and times - With some account ..., publisher John Murray, London, 1877, p. 181-82
1510-1540

God, Reading, Parting

“To say it once again: today I find it an impossible book — badly written, clumsy and embarrassing, its images frenzied and confused, sentimental, in some places saccharine-sweet to the point of effeminacy, uneven in pace, lacking in any desire for logical purity, so sure of its convictions that it is above any need for proof, and even suspicious of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, 'music' for those who have been baptized in the name of music and who are related from the first by their common and rare experiences of art, a shibboleth for first cousins in artibus [in the arts] an arrogant and fanatical book that wished from the start to exclude the profanum vulgus [the profane mass] of the 'educated' even more than the 'people'; but a book which, as its impact has shown and continues to show, has a strange knack of seeking out its fellow-revellers and enticing them on to new secret paths and dancing-places.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Birth of Tragedy

Nochmals gesagt, heute ist es mir ein unmögliches Buch, - ich heisse es schlecht geschrieben, schwerfällig, peinlich, bilderwüthig und bilderwirrig, gefühlsam, hier und da verzuckert bis zum Femininischen, ungleich im Tempo, ohne Willen zur logischen Sauberkeit, sehr überzeugt und deshalb des Beweisens sich überhebend, misstrauisch selbst gegen die Schicklichkeit des Beweisens, als Buch für Eingeweihte, als "Musik" für Solche, die auf Musik getauft, die auf gemeinsame und seltene Kunst-Erfahrungen hin von Anfang der Dinge an verbunden sind, als Erkennungszeichen für Blutsverwandte in artibus, - ein hochmüthiges und schwärmerisches Buch, das sich gegen das profanum vulgus der "Gebildeten" von vornherein noch mehr als gegen das "Volk" abschliesst, welches aber, wie seine Wirkung bewies und beweist, sich gut genug auch darauf verstehen muss, sich seine Mitschwärmer zu suchen und sie auf neue Schleichwege und Tanzplätze zu locken.
"Attempt at a Self-Criticism", p. 5
The Birth of Tragedy (1872)

People, Secret, Books, Education

“I envision a society without any physical or psychological barriers towards the blind – a barrier-free environment where the blind can walk freely, can travel, can work, think for themselves, and live proud and dignified lives like other citizens. Society thinks that we can only sing sweet songs, only become teachers and telephone operators in the bank. But we can do more. We can dance, we can fire juggle, we can do martial arts, we can become managers and directors of companies. But society is constantly interpreting what we can do and what we can’t. This has to change very soon.”

Tiffany Brar (1988) Indian Social Activist

As quoted in They Say the Blind Should Not Lead the Blind. She Proves Them Wrong. https://www.thebetterindia.com/40485/tiffany-brar-working-for-blind/ (December 22, 2015) by Ranjini Sivaswamy, The Better India.

Travel, Thinking, Teachers, Change

“I also often hear the word 'evolution'. Repeatedly I am asked to explain how my painting evolved. To me there is no past or future in my art. If a work of art cannot live always in the present it must not be considered at all. The art of the Greeks, of the Egyptians, of the great painters who lived in other times, is not an art of the past; perhaps it is more alive today than it ever was. Art does not evolve by itself, the ideas of people change and with them their mode of expression.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Paris 1923
As quoted by Marius de Zayas, in 'The Arts', New York, May 1923
Quotes, 1920's, "Picasso Speaks," 1923

People, Idea, Change, Time

Quotes about art page 4

Quotes about art
page 4