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 art has three factors, the disease, the patient, the physician. The physician is the servant of the art. The patient must cooperate with the physician in combatting the disease."
"Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God."
"If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine - why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity?"
"Art is very tricky because it's what you do for yourself. It's much harder for me to make those works than the monuments or the architecture."
"You might argue that the history of contemporary art is a series of avant-garde movements, each new wave outraging the last."
"The problem with contemporary art is that no one bothers to do the research necessary to give people what they want."
"No art is possible without a dance with death."
"Art is an instrument in the war against the enemy."
"The academic teaching on beauty is false. We have been misled, but so completely misled that we can no longer find so much as a shadow of a truth again. The beauties of the Parthenon, the Venuses, the Nymphs, the Narcisusses, are so may lies. Art is not the application of a canon of beauty, but what the instinct and the brain can conceive independently of that canon."
"I don't own any of my own paintings because a Picasso original costs several thousand dollars and that's a luxury I cannot afford."
"To draw you must close your eyes and sing."
"I have lived among enough painters and around studios to have had all the theories - and how contradictory they are - rammed down my throat. A man has to have a gizzard like an ostrich to digest all the brass-tacks and wire nails of modern art theories."
"It [The Gesundheit Institute] also won't separate the healing arts. All of them work together - traditional medicine and surgery with acupuncture, homeopathy, etc. We want to make the hospital a place a person can't wait to come to, whether they are working there or being there as a patient. Because we are interested in promoting wellness, we will integrate medicine with performing arts, arts and crafts, agriculture, recreation, nature, and social service. Those are some skeletal parts."
"Desire is not what you see, but what you imagine."
"I always like to leave art and music open to interpretation."
"The most immoral and disgraceful and dangerous thing that anybody can do in the arts is knowingly to feed back to the public its own ignorance and cheap tastes."
"Told me my tape taught them to swear. What about the make-up you allow your 12 year old daughter to wear?"
"True imagination is not fanciful daydreaming; it is fire from heaven."
"The arts not only imbue our sense of sight, balance, movement, touch and hearing, they also lift our logical minds - the traditional focus of modern education - into the reaches of possibility, invention and genius."
"Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care."
