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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"He thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down."
"Art of course survives on the walls of private dwellings and corporate offices, but it 'dies' in the sense of losing its public, community-gathering, world-historical significance."
"I think art, the discipline of creating, really does require tremendous solitude. But the whole creative process can seal your life to such an extent that while you're creating, you feel very self-sufficient. I've certainly experienced that."
"In America, a metrical poem is likely to conjure up the idea of the sort of poet who wears ties and lunches at the faculty club. In Russia it suggests the moral force of an art practiced against the greatest personal odds, as a discipline, solitary and intense."
"Poetry is not only the most concise way of conveying the human experience; it also offers the highest possible standards for any linguistic operation."
"Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations."
"My mother told me to keep on singing, and that kept me working through the cotton fields. She said God has his hand on you. You'll be singing for the world someday."
"The art of music is good, for the reason, among others, that it produces pleasure; but what proof is it possible to give that pleasure is good? If, then, it is asserted that there is a comprehensive formula, including all things which are in themselves good, and that whatever else is good, is not so as an end, but as a mean, the formula may be accepted or rejected, but is not a subject of what is commonly understood by proof."
"Eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard ... All poetry is of the nature of the soliloquy."
"Every human action gains in honor, in grace, in all true magnificence, by its regard to things that are to come. It is the far sight, the quiet and confident patience, that, above all other attributes, separate man from man, and near him to his Maker; and there is no action nor art, whose majesty we may not measure by this test."
"Every good piece of art... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it."
"If you can draw the stone rightly, everything within reach of art is also within yours."
"He who has learned what is commonly considered the whole art of painting, that is, the art of representing any natural object faithfully, has as yet only learned the language by which his thoughts are to be expressed."
"Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and human soul."
"Science studies the relations of things to each other: but art studies only their relations to man."
"Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth. I find this more and more every day: an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all the truly great men. It is sure to involve a relative intensity of disdain towards base things, and an appearance of sternness and arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid, and vulgar people"
"Engraving then, is, in brief terms, the Art of Scratch."
"Your art is to be the praise of something that you love. It may only be the praise of a shell or a stone."
"The man who can see all gray, and red, and purples in a peach, will paint the peach rightly round, and rightly altogether. But the man who has only studied its roundness may not see its purples and grays, and if he does not will never get it to look like a peach; so that great power over color is always a sign of large general art-intellect."
"The entire vitality of art depends upon its being either full of truth, or full of use; and that, however pleasant, wonderful, or impressive it may be in itself, it must yet be of inferior kind, and tend to deeper inferiority, unless it has clearly one of these main objects, either to state a true thing, or to adorn a serviceable one."
