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 principle of martial arts is not a thing that can be learned, like a science, by fact-finding and instruction in facts. It has to grow spontaneously, like a flower, in a mind free from emotions and desires."
"Where the world ceases to be the scene of our personal hopes and wishes, where we face it as free beings admiring, asking and observing, there we enter the realm of Art and Science."
"All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics."
"Playwriting is an oral art; it's not an art of a writer expecting to be read but a writer expecting to be heard."
"He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars."
"Orpheus with his lute made trees, And the mountain tops that freeze, Bow themselves, when he did sing; To his music, plants and flowers Ever sprung; as sun and showers There had made a lasting spring. Every thing that heard him play, Even the billows of the sea, Hung their heads, and then lay by. In sweet music is such art, Killing care and grief of heart Fall asleep, or hearing, die."
"Art made tongue-tied by authority."
"The truth comes as conqueror only because we have lost the art of receiving it as guest."
"It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to, the feeling for the things themselves, for reality is more important than the feeling for pictures."
"Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down."
"Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures."
"In the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction. Nowadays a young man hardly envies anyone his gifts, his art, the love of a beautiful girl, or his fame; he only envies him his money. Give me money, he will say, and I am saved...He would die with nothing to reproach himself with, and under the impression that if only he had had the money he might really have lived and might even have achieved something great."
"Who does not know the evils of war cannot appreciate its benefits."
"In all fighting, the direct method may be used for joining battle, but indirect methods will be needed in order to secure victory. In battle, there are not more than two methods of attack.. the direct and the indirect; yet these two in combination give rise to an endless series of maneuvers."
"There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard.There are not more than five primary colors, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever been seen.There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet combinations of them yield more flavors than can ever be tasted."
"No matter how accomplished one might be in any branch of learning or art, one would have to be condemned to hell, if on where not endowed with th five cardinal virtues of Confucius-benevolence, justice, courtesy, wisdom and fidelity"
"Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum."
"Nature is the most beautiful thing we have. It's better than art because it's from the creator."
"This is something that I cannot get over -- that a whole line could be written by half a man, that a work could be built on the quicksand of a character."
"I treated Art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction."
