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 is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all - no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself - a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it."
"Art and religion (they are the same thing, in the end, of course) have given man the only happiness he has ever had."
"Where any view of money exists, art cannot be carried on."
"Where there is money there is no art."
"The ignorant Insults of Individuals will not hinder me from doing my duty to my Art"
"The mocker of Art is the mocker of Jesus."
"Rome & Greece swept Art into their maw & destroy'd it; a Warlike State never can produce Art. It will Rob & Plunder & accumulate into one place, & Translate & Copy & Buy & Sell & Criticize, but not Make."
"What has reason to do with the art of painting?"
"Works of Art can only be produc'd in Perfection where the Man is either in Affluence or is Above the Care of it."
"Degrade first the Arts if you'd Mankind Degrade. Hire Idiots to Paint with cold light & hot shade: Give high Price for the worst, leave the best in disgrace, And with Labours of Ignorance fill every place."
"Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully."
"The birch-bark canoe of the savage seems to me one of the most beautiful and perfect things of the kind constructed by human art."
"All the great masters have understood that there cannot be great art without the little limited life of the fable, which is always better the simpler it is, and the rich, far-wandering, many-imaged life of the half-seen world beyond it"
"No art can conquer the people alone-the people are conquered by an ideal of life upheld by authority."
"In life courtesy and self-possession, and in the arts style, are the sensible impressions of the free mind, for both arise out of a deliberate shaping of all things and from never being swept away, whatever the emotion into confusion or dullness."
"How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men's hearts that we call progress ?"
"When we are high and airy hundreds say That if we hold that flight they'll leave the place, While those same hundreds mock another day Because we have made our art of common things."
"There is no release In a bodkin or disease, Nor can there be a work so great As that which cleans man's dirty slate."
"Speech after long silence; it is right, All other lovers being estranged or dead . . . That we descant and yet again descant Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song: Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young We loved each other and were ignorant."
"Art bids us touch and taste and hear and see the world, and shrinks from what Blake calls mathematic form, from every abstract form, from all that is of the brain only."
