Art Quotes

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A drama critic is a person who surprises the playwright by informing him what he meant.
Wilson Mizner

A person needs a little madness, or else they never dare cut the rope and be free.
Nikos Kazantzakis /Zorba the Greek/

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need.
Will Rogers

All art is a revolt against man's fate.
Andre Malraux /Voices of Silence /

All nature is but art unknown to thee,
All chance direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood.
Alexander Pope /Essay on Man/

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.
William Shakespeare

An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist-a master-and that is what Auguste Rodin was-can look at an old woman, protray her exactly as she is...and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be.
Robert Heinlein

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 doesn't want to be familiar. It wants to astonish us. Or, in some cases, to enrage us. It wants to move us. To touch us. Not accommodate us, make us comfortable.
Jamake Highwater /The Language of Vision /

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.
Henri Bergson

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.
Pablo Picasso

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
Marcel Duchamp

Art is long, life short; judgment difficult, opportunity transient.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Art is made to disturb, science reassures.
Georges Braque

Art is never finished, only abandoned.
Leonardo da Vinci

Art is not about itself but the attention we bring to it.
Marcel Duchamp

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.
Alfred North Whitehead

Art is the Mirror of our betrayed ideals.
Doris Lessing /The Golden Notebook/

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

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere
G. K. Chesterton

Bad artists copy. Good artists steal.
Pablo Picasso

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

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
Scott Adams

Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.
Will Rogers

Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
Oscar Wilde

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.
Michelangelo

In a painting, what counts is the unexpected.
Georges Braque

In art, progress lies not in an extension, but in a knowledge of limitations.
Georges Braque

In general, the art of government consists of taking as much money as possible from one class of citizens to give to another.
Voltaire

It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf.
H. L. Mencken

It's not what you see that is art. Art is the gap.
Marcel Duchamp

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.
Dwight D. Eisenhower

Life is like music; it must be composed by ear, feeling, and instinct, not by rule.
Samuel Butler

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.
Samuel Butler

Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.
Agnes de Mille

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
Victor Hugo

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
Rainer Maria Rilke

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

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.
Plato

Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.
Isaac Newton

Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.
Marcel Proust

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.
William James

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.
William Hazlitt

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.
Voltaire

The cheap, no matter how charming, how immediate, does not wear so well. It has a way of telling its story the first time through.
William Littler

The difference between a bad artist and a good one is: the bad artist seems to copy a great deal; the good one really does.
William Blake

The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.
Oscar Wilde

The great artist, whether he be musician, painter, or poet, is known for this absolute unexpectedness.
Loren Eiseley /Strangeness in the Proportion /

The great creators — the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors — stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful.
Ayn Rand /The Fountainhead/

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.
Heraclitus

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.
Albert Einstein

The notes I handle no better than many pianists, But the pauses between the notes - ah, that is where the art resides!
Artur Schnabel

The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things.
Leonardo da Vinci

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.
Salvador Dali

The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.
Bertrand Russell

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.
Georges Braque

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.
Salvador Dali

To be an artist is to fail, as no other dare to fail
Marcel Proust

To draw you must close your eyes and sing.
Pablo Picasso

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw

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