Art

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.  - Jean Arp

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious. - Lester Bangs

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure. - Mikhail Baryshnikov

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning. - Jacques Barzun

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men. - Simone De Beauvoir

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal. - Andre Breton

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions that when it ceases to be dangerous you don't want it. - Anthony Burgess

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other. - Neal Cassady

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers. - Willa Cather

With an apple I will astonish Paris. - Paul Cezanne

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. - Marc Chagall

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

Art is science made clear. - Jean Cocteau

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up. - Cyril Connolly

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs. - Charlotte Saunders Cushman

There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad. - Salvador Dali

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. - Angela Y. Davis

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us. - Guy Debord

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out. - John Drummond

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them. - Eliza Farnham

I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to be art. - Carrie Fisher

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear. - Marilyn French

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model. - Northrop Frye

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness. - Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Art is either plagiarism or revolution. - Paul Gauguin

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh. - Allen Ginsberg

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self. - Jean-Luc Godard

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors? - Nadine Gordimer

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand. - Gunther Grass

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all. - Vaclav Havel

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed. - David Hockney

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

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process. - Henry James

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end. - James Joyce

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract. - Paul Klee

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

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it. - Bella Lewitzky

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude. - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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. - Marshall Mcluhan

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language. - Robert Menzies

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. - Michelangelo

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life. - Henry Miller

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor. - William Morris

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens. - Grandma Moses

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with. - Robert Motherwell

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life. - Pablo Picasso

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious. - Alexander Pope

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

Art is too serious to be taken seriously. - Ad Reinhardt

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci] - Pierre Auguste Renoir

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.] - Auguste Rodin

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry. - John Ruskin

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart. - Robert Schumann

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort. - George Bernard Shaw

Art is the signature of civilizations. - Beverly Sills

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment. - Lionel Trilling

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs. - Edward Varese

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along. - Evelyn Waugh

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction. - Simone Weil

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

All art is quite useless.  - Oscar Wilde

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you. - Robert Wilson

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found. - George E. Woodberry

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them. - Frank Lloyd Wright

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

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all. - Henry David Thoreau

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. - G.K. Chesterton

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art. - Charlie Parker

Still, there is a calm, pure harmony, and music inside of me. - Vincent van Gogh

Abstract art: a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered. - Al Capp

Every time I paint a portrait, I lose a friend. - John Sargent

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything. - Eugene Delacroix

The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.  - Salvador Dali

A drama critic is a man who leaves no turn unstoned. - George Bernard Shaw

When love and skill work together expect a masterpiece. - John Ruskin

I am no longer afraid of becoming lost, because the journey back always reveals something new, and that is ultimately good for the artist. - Billy Joel

Art is simply a right method of doing things. The test of the artist does not lie in the will with which he goes to work, but in the excellence of the work he produces.  - Thomas Aquinas

I don’t want people who want to dance. I want people who have to dance.  - George Balanchine

It is the painting that makes me so happy these days. - Vincent van Gogh

There is a sun, a light that for want of another word I can only call yellow, pale sulphur yellow, pale golden citron. How lovely yellow is! - Vincent van Gogh

I am always in hope of making a discovery by a wedding of two complementary colors, their mingling and opposition, the mysterious vibration of kindred spirits. - Vincent van Gogh

I often think the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day. - Vincent van Gogh

As long as autumn lasts, I shall not have hands, canvas and colors enough to paint the beautiful things I see. - Vincent van Gogh

A beautiful thing never gives so much pain as does failing to hear and see it. - Michelangelo

In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it. - Michelangelo

I live and love in God's peculiar light. - Michelangelo