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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"What I've discovered is that in art, as in music, there's a lot of truth-and then there's a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It's the moment that the audience falls in love."
"When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time."
"I write about what I know: sex, pornography, art, fame obsession, drugs, and alcohol. I mean, why would anyone care to listen to me if I wasn't an expert in what I write about?"
"I was doing these performance art pop music pieces in the city. And they were a bit on the eccentric side I suppose. So people started to call me Gaga after the Queen song 'Radio Gaga.'"
"What I talked about in it was the idea of celebrity, and celebrities being treated like blacks were in the '60s, having no rights, and the fact that people can slander your name. I said that in the toast. And I had to say this in a position where I, from the art world, am marrying Kim. And how we're going to fight to raise the respect level for celebrities so that my daughter can live a more normal life. She didn't choose to be a celebrity. But she is. So I'm going to fight to make sure she has a better life."
"I submit that Zooey's face was close to being a wholly beautiful face. As such, it was of course vulnerable to the same variety of glibly undaunted and usually specious evaluations that any legitimate art object is. I think it just remains to be said that any one of a hundred everyday menaces — a car accident, a head cold, a lie before breakfast — could have disfigured or coarsened his bounteous good looks in a day or a second."
"You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-making. As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don't expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses. . . I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death — if you aren't as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach."
"Art isn't meaningless... It is in itself. It isn't in that it tries to make life less so."
"Beware the artist who's an intellectual also. The artist who doesn't fit."
"If the art of war were nothing but the art of avoiding risks, glory would become the prey of mediocre minds.... I have made all the calculations; fate will do the rest."
"The most difficult art is not in the choice of men, but in giving to the men chosen the highest service of which they are capable."
"A legislator must know how to take advantage of even the defects of those he wants to govern. The art consists in making others work rather than in wearing oneself out."
"The art of government is not to let me grow stale."
"What is the big deal about Eminem? Since when is offensive language a reason for being unpopular? I like the fact that Eminem is brash and angry and politically incorrect. At least he has an opinion. He's stirring things up. He's provoking a discussion. He's making people's blood boil. He's reflecting what's going on in society right now. That is what art is supposed to do."
"In some respects I will never die. Because art is immortal. What we leave behind and what we create - the energy that we put out into the world is eternal."
"True art takes note not merely of form but also of what lies behind."
"It is perilous to study too deeply the arts of the Enemy, for good or for ill."
"What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful 'sub-creator'. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is 'true': it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside."
"I usually don't mind movies that people think go overboard because that's what art is all about. Art is about pushing us and making us examine ourselves."
"...a nation could change its way of life, its history, its technology, its art, literature, and culture, but it would never have a real chance to change its gestures."
