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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"The picture must all come out of the artist's inside, awareness of forms and figures... It is more than memory. It is the image as it lives in the consciousness, alive like a vision, but unknown."
"Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness and atonement — meaning atoneness, the state of being at one with the object."
"Since obscenity is the truth of our passion today, it is the only stuff of art -- or almost the only stuff."
"After all, the world is not a stage-not to me: nor a theatre: nor a show-house of any sort. And art, especially novels, are not little theatres where the reader sits aloft and watches...and sighs, commiserates, condones and smiles. That's what you want a book to be: because it leaves you so safe and superior, with your two-dollar ticket to the show. And that's what my books are not and never will be...Whoever reads me will be in the thick of the scrimmage, and if he doesn't like it if he wants a safe seat in the audience-let him read someone else."
"Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can't invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes."
"The training of the mind is an art. If this can be considered art, one's life is art."
"Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods."
"No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?"
"The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition."
"Have you not seen that in our days Of any whose story, song or art Delights us, our sincerest praise Means, when all's said, 'You break my heart?"
"The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion."
"Nature scarcely ever gives us the very best; for that we must have recourse to art."
"The great art of giving consists in this the gift should cost very little and yet be greatly coveted, so that it may be the more highly appreciated."
"There is no beauty unaided, no excellence that does not sink to the barbarous, unless saved by art."
"The theater is necessary. Dance is necessary. Song is necessary. The arts are necessary- they are a necessary part of our lives"
"Art, if it is successful in the task of questioning reality, if it is good painting and not merely a performance of dexterity, will be an affirmation of God."
"Somebody can paint with a fine brush like Monet and do millions of little dots or somebody can splatter it up there like Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock and go "Yep, that's art." That's okay."
"In my low periods, I wondered what was the point of creating art. For whom? Are we animating God? Are we talking to ourselves? And what was the ultimate goal? To have one's work caged in art's great zoos - the Modern, the Met, the Louvre?"
"I started thinking what could happen with my art and I realized that the biggest thing that could is that it winds up in a museum. It's like finding a rare animal and putting it in the zoo."
"Creativity is basically a feminine process. I'm convinced that we have in our soul, everybody, this masculine side and this feminine side. So at the end of the day, you always use this feminine creative energy to write or to do any type of art or creativity. So if I see that my protagonist is feminine, it's not more difficult, no. And even when my protagonist is masculine, I'm writing from using this feminine energy."
