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 means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least temporarily, the ravages of homesickness. To speak of 'what is past, or passing or to come'-in the most meticulous language thereby to assure its permanence; to honor those we've loved and learned from and must outlive."
"At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it."
"And what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality."
"A diverse and lively collection, the highest art of the interview."
"Art originates in play - in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy; it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release."
"Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art."
"the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others."
"Writing is the most solitary of arts."
"One of the qualities of writing that is not much stressed is its problem-solving aspect, having to do with the presentation of material: how to structure it, what sort of sentences (direct, elliptical, simple or compound, syntactically elaborate), what tone (in art, "tone" is everything), pacing. Paragraphing is a way of dramatization, as the look of a poem on a page is dramatic; where to break lines, where to end sentences."
"For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too."
"Everybody's an art critic."
"When you consider how epidemic boredom is in our time, you have to concede that entertaining is a healing art."
"Perfume has a long and fascinating history and the beautifully crafted bottles used to store it over the centuries demonstrate its importance. Each has mirrored the latest tastes in fashion technology, design and art."
"That impulse I think is a form of love. Poetry is something that comes to you, rather than your having to work out its form beforehand."
"Too much trouble,' 'Too expensive,' or 'Who will know the difference' are death knells for good food. ... Cooking is not a particularly difficult art, and the more you cook and learn about cooking, the more sense it makes."
"I'd like for people to be able to go to the universities and get a degree in fine arts-gastronomy."
"Cooking hasn't yet been accepted as the art form it is. It should be on the level with any of the other art forms."
"Paris is certainly one of the most boastful of cities, and you could argue that it has had a lot to boast about: at various times the European centre of power, of civilisation, of the arts, and (self-advertisingly, at least) of love."
"Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at see, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us. Catastrophe has become art; but this is no reducing process. It is freeing, enlarging, explaining. Catastrophe has become art: that is, after all, what it is for."
"In an oppressive society the truth-telling nature of literature is of a different order, and sometimes valued more highly than other elements in a work of art."
