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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"Every philosophy is complete in itself and, like a genuine work of art, contains the totality. Just as the works of Apelles and Sophocles, if Raphael and Shakespeare had known them, should not have appeared to them as mere preliminary exercises for their own work, but rather as a kindred force of the spirit, so, too reason cannot find in its own earlier forms mere useful preliminary exercises for itself."
"In the case of all other sciences, arts, skills, and crafts, everyone is convinced that a complex and laborious programme of learning and practice is necessary for competence. Yet when it comes to philosophy, there seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and last, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize."
"Art must take reality by surprise. It takes those moments which are for us merely a moment, plus a moment, plus another moment, and arbitrarily transforms them into a special series of moments held together by a major emotion."
"If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. That's why they call it artWORK!"
"To live an art-filled life, one must be willing to try new things & accept that things change."
"Love is a simple thing and a deep thing: it is an act of life and not an illusion. Art is an illusion."
"People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic."
"You will think less of the art, when you know the artist"
"The real Brahms is nothing more than a sentimental voluptuary"
"Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure."
"I was working in the gap where Martin Luther King, Jr. quoted communism and Warhol appropriated the protest image and named it riot, which is precisely what King didn't want his cause to be associated with. But that was the very thing that made it sexy to the art world. So I played between the two associations."
"In every Art it is good to have a master. [In every art it is good to have a master.]"
"The art school party in Liverpool, in a flat in the students' accomdation, was the first all night party I ever went to...I puked up next morning. Cynthia was there, and I remember saying drunkenly to her 'I wish I had a nice girl like you'"
"Every time an artist dies, part of the vision of mankind passes with him."
"A world turned into a stereotype, a society converted into a regiment, a life translated into a routine, make it difficult for either art or artists to survive. Crush individuality in society and you crush art as well. Nourish the conditions of a free life and you nourish the arts, too."
"As Michael (Chekhov)'s pupil, I learned more about acting. I learned psychology, history, and the good manners of art - taste."
"I was lucky to have my wife as the art director, and it turned out to be quite something - a great success. I'm very proud of it."
"In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,...[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.:; 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula."
"To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words.... Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence."
"During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there."
