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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"I'm always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time. The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you're drowning, and it's there to rescue you. Then it sounds like music."
"Art remains the one way possible of speaking truth."
"No work of Art is really ever finished. They only stop at good places."
"What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media."
"The man of genius is he and he alone who finds such joy in his art that he will work at it come hell or high water."
"Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service."
"I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot."
"Throw your soldiers into positions whence there is no escape, and they will prefer death to flight. If they will face death, there is nothing they may not achieve."
"Factors in the art of warfare are: First, calculations; second, quantities; third, logistics; fourth, the balance of power; and fifth, the possibility of victory is based on the balance of power."
"In the midst of difficulties we are always ready to seize an advantage, we may extricate ourselves from misfortune."
"When the higher officers are angry and insubordinate, and on meeting the enemy give battle on their own account from a feeling of resentment, before the commander-in-chief can tell whether or not he is in a position to fight, the result is ruin."
"It is a doctrine of war not to assume the enemy will not come, but rather to rely on one's readiness to meet him; not to presume that he will not attack, but rather to make one's self invincible."
"Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory: He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight. He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces. He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks. He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared. He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign."
"Should one ask: 'how do I cope with a well-ordered enemy host about to attack me?' I reply: seize something he cherishes and he will conform to your desires."
"Should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak."
"With the true artist, the social formula that he recommends is a matter of secondary importance; the source of his art, its animating spirit, is decisive."
"It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt"
"The art of choosing men is not nearly so difficult as the art of enabling those chosen to attain their full worth."
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger is so not true. You know what makes you stronger? When people treat you & your art with dignity."
"She barely understands her dreams of belly button rings and other kind of things. Symbolic of change, but the thing that is strange, it that the changes occur, and now she's just a part of the herd."
