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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"It’s about a singer who first sneered about my allegedly not authentic style but later she stole and copied it. And now she’s acting like I am the art project and she the true super artist. My God and people actually believe her, she’s successful! I shouldn't continue ranting, it doesn’t get anywhere."
"You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul."
"Some people's photography is an art. Not mine. Art is a dirty word in photography. All this fine art crap is killing it already."
"I like that feeling when you’re making art, that you’re taking the energy out of your body and putting it into a physical object. I like things that are labor-intensive : you make a little thing and another little thing and another little thing, and eventually you see a possibility."
"There is an art of seeing things as they are: without naming, without being caught in a network of words, without thinking interfering with perception."
"Art always opts for the individual, the concrete; art is not Platonic."
"Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity."
"I believe that dance was the first art. A philosopher has said that dance and architecture were the first arts. I believe that dance was first because it's gesture, it's communication. That doesn't mean it's telling a story, but it means it's communicating a feeling, a sensation to people."
"Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? ...people who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree."
"Literature is the noblest of all the arts. Music dies on the air, or at best exists only as a memory; oratory ceases with the effort; the painter's colors fade and the canvas rots; the marble is dragged from its pedestal and is broken into fragments."
"The only basis for living is believing in life, loving it, and applying the whole force of one's intellect to know it better."
"...in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power-almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving. Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which "only" profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend energy on?"
"Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts."
"By the single example of this painter devoted to his art with such independence, my destiny as a painter opened out to me."
"The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us."
"A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist."
"Life obliges me to do something, so I paint."
"Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics. It is they and they alone who found religions and create great works of art. The world will never realize how much it owes to them and what they have suffered in order to bestow their gifts on it."
"I wish to boast that Pygmalion has been an extremely successful play all over Europe and North America as well as at home. It is so intensely and deliberately didactic, and its subject is esteemed so dry, that I delight in throwing it at the heads of the wiseacres who repeat the parrot cry that art should never be didactic. It goes to prove my contention that art should never be anything else."
"Surrealism is the magical surprise of finding a lion in a wardrobe, where you were 'sure' of finding shirts."
