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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"Art to me is not precious enough that I feel territorial about what the word gets applied to. Conversations about what counts as art and what doesn't doesn't captivate my attention very much."
"Like a groupie incognito posing as a real singer, life imitates art."
"Yeah, I can't separate the art from the music and the music from the art. I think that stems from going to school for film first, and kind of stumbling onto music as my career."
"Perilous to us all are the devices of an art deeper than we possess ourselves."
"Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity."
"I do not conceive of any manifestation of culture, of science, of art, as purposes in themselves. I think the purpose of science and culture is man."
"Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected."
"Every single work of art is the fulfillment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image."
"Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all."
"Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another."
"I gave my genius to my life, but my talent to my art."
"I am quite incapable of understanding how any work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint. The sphere of art and the sphere of ethics are absolutely distinct and separate."
"A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. ...Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known. ...Art is Individualism."
"Perhaps there may come into my art also, no less than into my life, a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art. We are no longer in art concerned with the type. It is with the exception that we have to do. I cannot put my sufferings into any form they took, I need hardly say. Art only begins where Imitation ends, but something must come into my work, of fuller memory of words perhaps, of richer cadences, of more curious effects, of simpler architectural order, of some aesthetic quality at any rate."
"A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art."
"The longer I live, Dorian, the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us. In art, as in politics, les grand-pères ont toujours tort."
"No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will."
"Nothing is more useful to man that those arts which have no utility."
"Fiorello LaGuardia saved City Center. The real man saved it, and he made this building into a performing arts venue."
"I think much sociopolitical art delivers truisms that are quite flat."
