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 aim of great books is ethical: to teach what it means to be a man. Every major form of literary art has taken for its deeper themes what T.S. Eliot called "the permanent things"-the norms of human action."
"I think art can really serve to inspire a movement - and, of course, it has in the past. The Civil Rights movement wouldn't have the same resonance without the songs from everyone from Pete Seeger to Odetta to James Brown."
"Thirty-three-years-old, still creating art. It's rage, it's creativity, it's pain, it's hurt, but it's the opportunity to still have my voice get out there through music."
"Having once found the intensity of art, nothing else that can happen in life can ever again seem as important as the creative process."
"Ernest [Hemmingway] was always ready to lend a helping hand to the one on the rung above him."
"It's not the art, it's the heart. What [God] reads during our worship is the inner attitude. Worship is spiritual; it's organic; it's relational."
"Art is always good. It just depends if you like or not."
"My skin is an art gallery right, with paintings and crucifixes hoping to save me from all the dangers in the music business"
"Art does not want the representation of a beautiful thing, but the representation of something beautiful."
"What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine."
"Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow."
"There should be a law that no ordinary newspaper should be allowed to write about art. The harm they do by their foolish and random writing it would be impossible to overestimate--not to the artist but to the public.... Without them we would judge a man simply by his work; but at present the newspapers are trying hard to induce the public to judge a sculptor, for instance, never by his statues but by the way he treats his wife; a painter by the amount of his income and a poet by the colour of his necktie."
"Art is not to be taught in Academies. It is what one looks at, not what one listens to, that makes the artist. The real schools should be the streets."
"The art of living is simply the art of using energy in an intelligent and creative way."
"Disability is an art - an ingenious way to live."
"The prince must consider, as has been in part said before, how to avoid those things which will make him hated or contemptible; and as often as he shall have succeeded he will have fulfilled his part, and he need not fear any danger in other reproaches."
"Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral. The size of the project means little in art, beyond the money matter. It is the quality of the character that really counts."
"I think that sexuality is only attractive when it’s natural and spontaneous. This is where a lot of them miss the boat. And then something I’d just like to spout off on. We are all born sexual creatures, thank God, but it’s a pity so many people despise and crush this natural gift. Art, real art, comes from it, everything."
""A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist.""
"Peace is first of all the art of being."
