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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"My best advice: win little battles. Get in the habit of winning, of shipping, of having customers that can't live without you. Once you've demonstrated you know how to do the art, then go after the windmills."
"The black man in Africa had mastered the arts and sciences. He knew the course of the stars in the universe before the man up in Europe knew that the earth wasn't flat."
"Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong."
"Artists reach areas far beyond the reach of politicians. Art, especially entertainment and music, is understood by everybody, and it lifts the spirits and the morale of those who hear it."
"You must know, then, that there are two methods of fighting, the one by law, the other by force: the first method is that of men, the second of beasts; but as the first method is often insufficient, one must have recourse to the second."
"Knowing how to fight made men more bold, because no one fears doing what it seems to him he has learned to do. Therefore, the ancients wanted their citizens to be trained in every warlike action."
"In homosexual love the passion is homosexuality itself. What a homosexual loves, as if it were his lover, his country, his art, his land, is homosexuality."
"Simplicity is the essence of the great, the true, the beautiful in art."
"The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist."
"I paint my own reality."
"Dance is low on the totem pole of the arts, because you're not left with a painting... a book that will stay there, a score you can read."
"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."
"Art is not truth; art is the lie which makes us see the truth."
"All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda."
"Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic. Playing with fashion is an art. The first rule is don't burn your wings."
"When I went to school, you had to take art, you had to play an instrument. You had to play an instrument. But it's all degraded since then. I do not know what kind of nation we are that is cutting art, music, and gym out of the public-school curriculum."
"I am an artist. The track is my canvas, and the car is my brush."
"There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness."
"The painter has the Universe in his mind and hands."
"The symbol of all art is the Prism. The goal is unrealism. The method is destructive. To break up the white light of objective realism, into the secret glories which it contains."
