Art quotes
22.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Explore further
Browse quotes that often appear alongside art — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
Quote collection
Follow a thought to its author, or read the full quote page.
"Good composition is like a suspension bridge; each line adds strength and takes none away... Making lines run into each other is not composition. There must be motive for the connection. Get the art of controlling the observer – that is composition."
"Art cannot be separated from life. It is the expression of the greatest need of which life is capable, and we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life's experience."
"The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world."
"Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do."
"Ponder and deliberate before you make a move."
"Agitate him and ascertain the pattern of his movement."
"In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact; to shatter and destroy it is not so good."
"Be subtle! be subtle! and use your spies for every kind of business."
"When you surround an army, leave an outlet free. Do not press a desperate foe too hard."
"Creatures are cups. The sciences and the arts and all branches of knowledge are inscriptions around the outside of the cups. When a cup shatters, the writing can no longer be read. The wine's the thing! The wine that's held in the mold of these physical cups. Drink the wine and know what lasts and what to love. The man who truly asks must be sure of two things: One, that he's mistaken in what he's doing or thinking now. And two, that there is a wisdom he doesn't know yet. Asking is half of knowing."
"And now, I'm just trying to change the world, one sequin at a time."
"Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art."
"Love isn't an emotion or an instinct - it's an art."
"I love the art world, I love art galleries, I love what it means - I love art."
"I could always live in my art but never in my life"
"Life has been your art. You have set yourself to music. Your days are your sonnets."
"I don't think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it's raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn't mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it."
"Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance."
"Errors are not in the art but in the artificers."
"It´s time we saw sex as the truly sacred art that it is. A deep meditation, a holy communion and a dance with the force of creation."
