Art quotes
22.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside art — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Cookery is a wholly unselfish art: as 'art for art's sake' it is unthinkable. A man may sing in his bath every morning without the least encouragement, but no cook can cook just for his or her own sake in a like manner. All good cooks, like all great artists, must have an audience worth cooking for."
"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."
"Art could be said to be a symbol of the universe, being linked with that absolute spiritual truth which is hidden from us in our positivistic, pragmatic activities."
"If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There's nothing behind it."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done."
"I never think that people die. They just go to department stores."
"Business art is the step that comes after Art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist."
"I think an artist is anybody who does something well, like if you cook well."
"Art is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit."
"With all art expression, when something is seen, it is a vivid experience, sudden, compelling, and inevitable."
"The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate upon without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument or follow a long chain of reasoning."
"The virtue as the art consecrates itself constantly to what's difficult to do, and the harder the task, the shinier the success."
"In part, art completes what nature cannot elaborate; and in part it imitates nature."
"In painting, the most brilliant colors, spread at random and without design, will give far less pleasure than the simplest outline of a figure."
"Some men turn every quality or art into a means of making money; this they conceive to be the end, and to the promotion of the end all things must contribute."
"Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and choice, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim."
"Music is the answer to the mystery of life. The most profound of all the arts, It expresses the deepest thoughts of life."
"When the guns roar, the arts die."
"A playwright... is... the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about."
"Thou art blind to the danger of marrying a woman who feels and acts out the principle of equal rights."
