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 arts of speech are rhetoric and poetry. Rhetoric is the art of transacting a serious business of the understanding as if it were a free play of the imagination; poetry that of conducting a free play of the imagination as if it were a serious business of the understanding."
"If we can reach in wih the art and touch the imagination of the child, no matter who, we have affected that child."
"I think art must be tough! I think art has to be hard. I don't think it should be easy. I think it should take foot-pounds of energy to produce that art, otherwise we would have more mediocre writers, and we don't have room for any more mediocrity in the world. There's already enough of it being visited on us night and day through the Internet, and through television, and through politics."
"Time is, in fact, a cross to bear, it passes on inexorably and remorselessly, destroying everything in its wake, save art and works of the intellect."
"So in all human affairs one notices, if one examines them closely, that it is impossible to remove one inconvenience without another emerging."
"Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature."
"I have always felt the word 'advertising' is either a diminutive or derogatory term that kind of goes with stuff people don't like, and I always felt frustrated because I felt like I was a communication artist or a media artist. The best advertising is one of the art forms of our culture."
"Politics: the art of appearing candid and completely open while concealing as much as possible."
"It's not movies and it's not "fine art." The beauty of a comic is that it's clear, direct communication. My work is getting simpler and more cartoony because I'm much more interested in communication now than in any illustrative value."
"The earth has music for those who listen."
"The Byzantines hammered away at their hard and orthodox symbols, because they could not be in a mood to believe that men could take a hint. The moderns drag out into lengths and reels of extravagance their new orthodoxy of being unorthodox, because they also cannot give a hint -- or take a hint. Yet all perfect and well-poised art is really a hint."
"The real art is not to come up with extraordinary clever words but to make ordinary simple words do extraordinary things. To use the language that we all use and to make amazing things occur."
"The days you work are the best days."
"Concerts are never real music, you have to give up the idea of hearing in them all the most beautiful things of art."
"Life being all inclusion and confusion, and art being all discrimination and selection, the latter, in search of the hard latent value with which it alone is concerned, sniffs round the mass as instinctively and unerringly as a dog suspicious of some buried bone."
"Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice."
"Art does not organize parties, nor is it the servant or colleague of power. Rather, the work of art becomes a political force simply through the faithful representation of the spirit. It is a political act to create an image of the self or of the collective."
"There are times when one would like to hang the whole human race, and finish the farce."
"Art is a reflection of everything that impacts your life."
"Cookery means…English thoroughness, French art, and Arabian hospitality; it means the knowledge of all fruits and herbs and balms and spices; it means carefulness, inventiveness, and watchfulness."
