Art Quotes - Page 48

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

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

Upton Sinclair

I have forced myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste.

Marcel Duchamp

If you don't want a generation of robots, fund the arts!

Cath Crowley

The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.

Michelle Obama

Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous and unfair.

Karl Lagerfeld

The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us

Gloria Steinem

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

H.L. Mencken

Observation is a dying art.

Stanley Kubrick

I’ve decided the act that cannot wait / is the important will to create / But, ah, if my belly is ignored / the pantry door I shall implore / But I’ve been known to reach the bed / ideas still famished in my head.

Roman Payne

To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.

James Joyce

What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

Oscar Wilde

In the traditional Islamic world, the hierarchy of the arts was not based on whether they were "fine" or "industrial" or "minor". It was based upon the effect of art on the soul of the human being.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr

One thing that struck me early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.

Diane Arbus

Bring together things that have not yet been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.

Robert Bresson

The term bohemian has a bad reputation because it's allied to myriad clichés, but Parisians originally adopted the term, associated with nomadic Gypsies, to describe artists and writers who stayed up all night and ignored the pressures of the industrial world.

Sarah Thornton

If London is a watercolor, New York is an oil painting.

Peter Shaffer

Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?

J.G. Ballard

Art is vice. You don't wed it, you rape it.

Edgar Degas

Now take a human body. Why wouldn't you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamental, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don't you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that is hasn't a single muscle which doesn't serve its purpose; that there's not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.

Ayn Rand

True art awakens theExtraordinaryOvation

The Gift

If we have no heretics we must invent them, for heresy is essential to health and growth.

Yevgeny Zamyatin

What is fair in men, passes away, but not so in art

Leonardo da Vinci

The world doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

Pablo Picasso

It is in books, poems, paintings which often give us the confidence to take seriously feelings in ourselves that we might otherwise never have thought to acknowledge.

Alain de Botton

Forget art. Put your trust in ice cream.

Charles Baxter

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. The chasm is never completely bridged. We all have the conviction, perhaps illusory, that we have much more to say than appears on the paper.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols ... Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.

Hakim Bey

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology.

George MacDonald

Art arises from loss. I wish this weren't the case. I wish that every time I met a new woman and she rocked my world, I was inspired to write my ass off. But that is not what happens. What happens is we lie around in bed eating chocolate and screwing. Art is what happens when things don't work out, when you're licking your wounds. Art is, to a larger extent than people would like to think, a productive licking of the wounds.

Steve Almond

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite -- getting something down.

Julia Cameron

People want to be bowled over by something special. Nine times out of ten you might strike out, but that tenth time, that peak experience, is what people want. That's what can move the world. That's art.

Haruki Murakami

I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.

Chaim Potok

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

Terry Pratchett

Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone's gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances; the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.

Italo Calvino

Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.

Leo Tolstoy

This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

Toni Morrison

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

Toni Morrison

Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.""I hate them for it," cried Hallward. "An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what is it; and for that the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.

Oscar Wilde

When bankers get together for dinner, they discuss Art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss Money

Oscar Wilde

Be natural my children. For the writer that is natural has fulfilled all the rules of

Charles Dickens

Not marble nor the gilded monumentsOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme,But you shall shine more bright in these contentsThan unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.When wasteful war shall statues overturnAnd broils roots out the work of masonry,Nor mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burnThe living record of your memory.'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmityShall you pace forth; your praise shall still find roomEven in the eyes of all posterityThat wear this world out to the ending doom.So, till judgement that yourself arise,You in this, and dwell in lovers eyes.

William Shakespeare

Watch a French housewife as she makes her way slowly along the loaded stalls… searching for the peak of ripeness and flavor… What you are seeing is a true artist at work, patiently assembling all the materials of her craft, just as the painter squeezes oil colors onto his palette ready to create a masterpiece.

Keith Floyd

All real works of art look as though they were done in joy.

Robert Henri

To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.

Edward Weston

Every now and then one paints a picture that seems to have opened a door and serves as a stepping stone to other things.

Pablo Picasso

I'm tired of feeling like I'm fucking crazy.I'm tired of driving till I see stars in my eyes.

Lana Del Rey

It is a mistake to think that the practice of my art has become easy to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has given so much care to the study of composition as I. There is scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not frequently and diligently studied.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The aim of language...is to communicate...to impart to others the results one has obtained...As I talk, I reveal the situation...I reveal it to myself and to others in order to change it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Art is, after all, only a trace – like a footprint which shows that one has walked bravely and in great happiness.

Robert Henri

It's a good thing you and your pills weren't around a few hundred years ago or there never would have been a Vermeer or a Caravaggio. You'd have drugged "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "The Taking of Christ" right the hell out of them.

Jennifer Donnelly

The greatest artist does not have any conceptWhich a single piece of marble does not itself containWithin its excess, though onlyA hand that obeys the intellect can discover it.

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of the free man.

Maxim Gorky

Artists are those who can evade the verbose.

Haruki Murakami

I have things in my head that are not like what anyone taught me — shapes and ideas so near to me, so natural to my way of being and thinking.

Georgia O'Keeffe

An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them.

Oscar Wilde

The tools are real. The viewer is real, you, the artist, is real and a part of everything you paint. You connect yourself to the viewer by sharing something that is inside of you that connects with something inside of him. All you have as your guide is that you know what moves you. All you have to do it with is a brush, some chemical and canvas, and technique.

Steven Brust

Humans make art to remember and be remembered,” said Caius. “Art is their weapon against forgetting.

Melissa Grey

Art is science made clear.

Jean Cocteau

Previous 1 … 46 47 48 49 50 … 68 Next

Art Quotes - Page 48

Related Topics