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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"The social or economic structure of the ideal state is of little concern to me. My desires are modest. Portraits of the head of the government should not exceed a postage stamp in size. No torture and no executions. No music, except coming through earphones, or played in theaters. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of art."
"Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the world dies with the individual."
"It must be confessed that the inventors of the mechanical arts have been much more useful to men than the inventors of syllogisms."
"I love an art-school girl. I mean dont we all?"
"I love great music and art, but I think 'cubist' songs and paintings are hideous."
"Godhead here in hiding, whom I adore Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more, See, Lord, at thy service low lies here a heart Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art"
"Many outsiders see the art world as elitist and it is, except it is also oddly down-to-earth and embracing of oddballs who don't fit in well anywhere else."
"Art attempts to find in the universe, in matter as well as in the facts of life, what is fundamental, enduring, essential."
"One of the things that's good for me is that I can go from one art form to another. Because I think if I had to write another novel now I would really not be good in my head anymore. It's too much. The frustration is so intense of knowing that this structure is right around the corner. Writing is a particular kind of frustration."
"Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted."
"There is a point, and it is reached more easily than is supposed, where interference with freedom of the arts and literature becomes an attack on the life of society."
"art is at least in part a way of collecting information about the universe."
"every human activity, whether it be love, philosophy, art, or revolution, is carried on with a special intensity in Paris."
"Art and propaganda have this much connection, that if a propaganda makes art impossible, it is clearly damned."
"The delight we find in art amounts to recognition of a saving grace, to an acknowledgment that the problem of life has a solution implicit in its own nature, though not yet formulated by the intellect."
"whatever a work of art may be, the artist certainly cannot dare to be simple. He must have a nature as complicated and as violent, as totally unsuggestive of the word innocence, as a modern war."
"Bad art is maintained by the neurotic, who is deadly afraid of authentic art because it inspires him to go on living, and he is terrified of life."
"When I was younger I did karate and martial arts, and I think it's really cool for girls to have those kinds of abilities."
"Speech is too often not the art of concealing thought, but of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal."
"What is nature? Art thou not the living government of God? O Heaven, is it in very deed He then that ever speaks through thee, that lives and loves in thee, that lives and loves in me?"
