The Art Quotes

Works of art are never finished, just stopped.

The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art.

Science is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths. Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon things beautiful and immortal and ever-changing.

Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.

Art is not an elitist gift for a few select people. Art is for everyone.

Abstract art is uniquely modern. It is a fundamentally romantic response to modern life - rebellious, individualistic, unconventional, sensitive, irritable.

Understanding is a form of blindness. Good art, I think, can never be understood.

Classical art stands for form; romantic art for content.

They say rock is dead. Andy [Warhol] said art is dead. God is dead according to Nietzsche. If everything's dead what's alive? Only technology. We're in the era of technology.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Art is first a seeing and then a revealing

Art is about energy positive and negative. All art has the power to heal because it helps us see who we are, and what we resist.

Real-life discussions involve a great many bores and boors who have never learned that the art of conversation demands listening as well as talking.

The role of art is not to express the personality but to overcome it.

When we free ourselves we are not freed into a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into a dimension in which Art is an obligation.

Art is always criticized and always an outsider gets the blame.

In the end, art is small beer. The really serious things are earning one's living so as not to be a parasite and loving one's neighbor.

Great art changes you.

Art is not special sauce applied to ordinary cooking; it is the cooking itself if it is good.

San Francisco itself is art, above all literary art. Every block is a short story, every hill a novel. Every home a poem, every dweller within immortal. That is the whole truth.

Inspiration may be a form of superconsciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness - I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

Remember to be submissive, thou art analien, a fugitive, and in need.

Art comes out of art; it begins with imitation, often in the form of parody, and it's in the process of imitating the voice of others that one comes to learn the sound of one's own.

And the thing that I always tried to do with important singers when I met them was to sit down and record everything they knew, give them a first real run-through of their art.

Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring.

On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.

In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.

The artist needs but a roof, a crust of bread, and his easel, and all the rest God gives him in abundance. He must live to paint and not paint to live.

For art to be art it has to cure.

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, As those move easiest who have learned to dance.

From vulgar bounds with brave disorder part, And snatch a grace beyond the reach of art.

Mrs. Patrick Cambell is an aged British battleship sinking rapidly and firing every available gun on her rescuers.

Didacticism is the death of art.

A walk down 14th street is more amazing than any masterpiece of art.

One cannot create an art that speaks to men when one has nothing to say.

An artist cannot be partially sincere any more than art can be an approximation of beauty.

My art recognizes the human place, the human context - especially in Britain, which is a landscape so worked by people for thousands of years, written, deeply ingrained with the presence of people.

The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.

I've decided something: Commercial things really do stink. As soon as it becomes commercial for a mass market it really stinks.

Being an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I'll be around making art when I'm 80

Common sense is not really so common. The Art of Thinking: Port-Royal Logic

All art, all education, can be merely a supplement to nature.

Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.

Excellence is not an art. It is the habit of practice.

Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.

Art not only imitates nature, but also completes its deficiencies.

Those who call themselves art photographers are pompous, arrogant egoists.

I communicate my innermost perceptions through art.

Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms.

To make the material speak to man in the name of man, this is the aim and reality of art.