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 business of every art is to bring something into existence, and the practice of an art involves the study of how to bring into existence something which is capable of having such an existence and has its efficient cause in the maker and not in itself."
"The same thing may have all the kinds of causes, e.g. the moving cause of a house is the art or the builder, the final cause is the function it fulfils, the matter is earth and stones, and the form is the definitory formula."
"Hippodamus, son of Euryphon, a native of Miletus, invented the art of planning and laid out the street plan of Piraeus."
"If the art of ship-building were in the wood, ships would exist by nature."
"And so long as they were at war, their power was preserved, but when they had attained empire they fell, for of the arts of peace they knew nothing, and had never engaged in any employment higher than war."
"Should a man live underground, and there converse with the works of art and mechanism, and should afterwards be brought up into the open day, and see the several glories of the heaven and earth, he would immediately pronounce them the work of such a Being as we define God to be."
"Only the four corners of the background remained. It was terribly difficult to fix my eyes on all of them at the same time. My experience was that the most difficult thing of all in art is painting in all four corners at the same time."
"To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived."
"Virtue is as little to be acquired by learning as genius; nay, the idea is barren, and is only to be employed as an instrument, in the same way as genius in respect to art. It would be as foolish to expect that our moral and ethical systems would turn out virtuous, noble, and holy beings, as that our aesthetic systems would produce poets, painters, and musicians."
"Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments."
"That which is not worth contemplating in life, is not worth recreating in art."
"I know when I watch certain actors or if I watch Thom Yorke sing on stage, I'm affected by it emotionally. I guess that's what we are all striving for in art but that's such a beautiful thing that happens between two people that may never even meet. So when you do get to meet someone who was affected in that way, it's awesome."
"I knew a gentleman that I had worked with over the years, who is no longer with us, and was a great influence in my life named Cachao - a Cuban musician, composer, arranger, and creator of the Mambo. The integrity of the journey is what's important - how you conduct yourself in the process. That's what Cachao was always about. He had great integrity, great dignity, was very humble, and dedicated to his art."
"Realism should only be the means of expression of religious genius... or, at the other extreme, the artistic expressions of monkeys which are quite satisfied with mere imitation. In fact, art is never realistic though sometimes it is tempted to be. To be really realistic a description would have to be endless."
"Just as all thought, and primarily that of non-signification, signifies something, so there is no art that has no signification."
"To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art."
"Art is a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are dead and those who are yet to be born."
"The only kind of sublimity which a painter or sculptor should aim at is to express by certain proportions and positions of limbs and features that strength and dignity of mind, and vigor and activity of body, which enables men to conceive and execute great actions."
"Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting."
"Art, unless it leads to right action, is no more than the opium of an intelligentsia."
