ART
1. A great artist is always before his time or behind it. ~George Moore
2. A man and his art are like a fool and his king. ~Corri Alius
3. A man paints with his brains and not with his hands. ~Michelangelo
4. A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. ~Albert Camus
5. A portrait has one advantage over its original: it is unconscious; and you may therefore admire without insulting it. I have seen portraits which have more. ~Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth, by Two Brothers, 1827
6. A subject that is beautiful in itself gives no suggestion to the artist. It lacks imperfection. ~Oscar Wilde
7. All art requires courage. ~Anne Tucker
8. All great art comes from a sense of outrage. ~Glenn Close
9. All the other colors are just colors, but purple seems to have a soul. Purple is not just a noun and an adjective but also a verb - when you look at it, it's looking back at you. ~Uniek Swain
10. An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. ~Charles Horton Cooley
11. An artist cannot talk about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture. ~Jean Cocteau
12. An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world. ~George Santayana
13. An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them. ~Andy Warhol
14. An artist must be careful not to throw his ideas out with the trash. ~Dena Groquet
15. An artist never really finishes his work; he merely abandons it. ~Paul Valéry
16. An artist's career always begins tomorrow. ~James McNeill Whistler
17. An artist's instinct is more refined than the typical mortal's. ~Holden Rinehart
18. An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way. ~Charles Bukowski
19. Any great work of art... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air. ~Leonard Bernstein, What Makes Opera Grand?
20. Anyone who says you can't see a thought simply doesn't know art. ~Wynetka Ann Reynolds
21. Architecture begins where engineering ends. ~Walter Gropius
22. Art arises when the secret vision of the artist and the manifestation of nature agree to find new shapes. ~Kahlil Gibran
23. Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. ~G.K. Chesterton
24. Art disturbs, science reassures. ~Georges Braque, Le Jour et la nuit
25. Art hath an enemy called ignorance. ~Ben Jonson
26. Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. ~Andre Gide
27. Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. ~André Gide
28. Art is a kind of illness. ~Giacomo Puccini
29. Art is a shadow of what a person is thinking... a small glimpse of what they hold inside. Little secrets, regrets, joys... every line has its own meaning. ~Sarah, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
30. Art is an adventure that never seems to end. ~Jason, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
31. Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life. ~Jean Paul Richter
32. Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization. ~Lincoln Steffens
33. Art is Man's nature. Nature is god's art. ~James Bailey
34. Art is not a thing; it is a way. ~Elbert Hubbard
35. Art is pictures straight from the heart. ~Ben, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
36. Art is spirituality in drag. ~Jennifer Yane
37. Art is the colors and textures of your imagination. ~Meghan, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
38. Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. ~Amy Lowell
39. Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. ~Amy Lowell
40. Art is the gift of God, and must be used unto His glory. ~H.W.Longfellow
41. Art is the only way to run away without leaving home. ~Twyla Tharp
42. Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail. ~Theodore Dreiser, Life, Art, and America, 1917
43. Art is the struggle to understand. ~Audrey Foris
44. Art is the triumph over chaos. ~John Cheever
45. Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul - and you answer. ~Star Richés
46. Art is your emotions flowing in a river of imagination. ~Devin, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
47. Art is your personal diary where you may color your thoughts and emotions on a page. ~Sara, Los Cerros Middle School, 1999
48. Art is... a question mark in the minds of those who want to know what's happening. ~Aaron Howard
49. Art, as far as it is able, follows nature, as a pupil imitates his master; thus your art must be, as it were, God's grandchild. ~Dante Alighieri, Inferno
50. Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. ~G.K. Chesterton
51. Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is. ~Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark, 1915
52. Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid. ~Jules Feiffer
53. As far as I am concerned, a painting speaks for itself. What is the use of giving explanations, when all is said and done? A painter has only one language. ~Pablo Picasso
54. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life. ~John Lubbock
55. But that's what being an artist is - feeling crummy before everyone else feels crummy. ~The New Yorker
56. But, after all, the aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live. ~Frank Stella
57. Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. ~Scott Adams
58. Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. ~Henry Ward Beecher
59. Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. ~Henry Ward Beecher
60. Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up. ~Pablo Picasso
61. Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer
62. Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. ~Oscar Wilde
63. Everything in creation has its appointed painter or poet and remains in bondage like the princess in the fairy tale 'til its appropriate liberator comes to set it free. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
64. Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together. ~John Ruskin
65. For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh. ~Georges Rouault
66. For the mystic what is how. For the craftsman how is what. For the artist what and how are one. ~William McElcheran
67. God and other artists are always a little obscure. ~Oscar Wilde
68. God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just goes on trying other things. ~Pablo Picasso
69. Grammar stops at love, and at art. ~Valentine Sterling
70. Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness. ~George Jean Nathan, House of Satan
71. Great art picks up where nature ends. ~Marc Chagall
72. I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum. ~Claes Oldenburg
73. I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things. ~Henri Matisse
74. I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for. ~Georgia O'Keeffe
75. I want to reach that condensation of sensations that constitutes a picture. ~Henri Matisse, Notes d'un peintre, 1908
76. If one looks closely enough, one can see angels in every piece of art. ~Adeline Cullen Ray
77. It has been said that art is a tryst, for in the joy of it maker and beholder meet. ~Kojiro Tomita
78. It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. ~Henry Moore
79. It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. ~Loren Eiseley, The Night Country, 1971
80. Let me ask you something, what is not art? ~Author Unknown
81. Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. ~Stella Adler
82. Listen carefully to first criticisms made of your work. Note just what it is about your work that critics don't like - then cultivate it. That's the only part of your work that's individual and worth keeping. ~Jean Cocteau
83. Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. ~G.K. Chesterton
84. Man will begin to recover the moment he takes art as seriously as physics, chemistry or money. ~Ernst Levy
85. Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. ~John Anthony Ciardi
86. No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist. ~Oscar Wilde
87. One of the best things about paintings is their silence - which prompts reflection and random reverie. ~Mark Stevens
88. Painting is easy when you don't know how, but very difficult when you do. ~Edgar Degas
89. Painting is just another way of keeping a diary. ~Pablo Picasso
90. Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen. ~Leonardo da Vinci
91. Painting is silent poetry. ~Plutarch, Moralia: How to Study Poetry
92. Pictures must not be too picturesque. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
93. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. ~Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy
94. Reflexes and instincts are not pretty. It is their decoration that initiates art. ~Martin H. Fischer
95. Sometimes, to pursue a new idea, the artist must forfeit his deposit on an old idea. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
96. Surely nothing has to listen to so many stupid remarks as a painting in a museum. ~Edmond & Jules de Goncourt
97. The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak. ~Hans Hofmann
98. The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. ~Aristotle
99. The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. ~Aristotle
100. The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. ~William Faulkner
101. The artist does not see things as they are, but as he is. ~Alfred Tonnelle
102. The artist gazes upon a reality and creates his own impression. The viewer gazes upon the impression and creates his own reality. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
103. The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe, he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life. ~Henry Miller
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104. The artist uses the talent he has, wishing he had more talent. The talent uses the artist it has, wishing it had more artist. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
105. The artist's talent sits uneasy as an object of public acclaim, having been so long an object of private despair. ~Robert Brault
106. The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep. ~Paul Strand
107. The fine arts once divorcing themselves from truth are quite certain to fall mad, if they do not die. ~Thomas Carlyle, Latter Day Pamphlets, no. 8
108. The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity. ~Alberto Giacometti
109. The painter puts brush to canvas, and the poet puts pen to paper. The poet has the easier task, for his pen does not alter his rhyme. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
110. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. ~T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, 1919
111. The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers. ~James Baldwin
112. The question of common sense is always what is it good for? - a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage. ~James Russell Lowell
113. The true painter strives to paint what can only be seen through his world. ~André Malraux
114. The world today doesn't make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do? ~Pablo Picasso
115. There is in every artist's studio a scrap heap of discarded works in which the artist's discipline prevailed against his imagination. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com
116. There is no surer method of evading the world than by following Art, and no surer method of linking oneself to it than by Art. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
117. To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way. ~E.M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951
118. To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist. ~Schumann
119. Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass. ~Fran Lebowitz
120. We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies. ~Pablo Picasso
121. What art offers is space - a certain breathing room for the spirit. ~John Updike
122. What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art. ~Augustus Saint-Gaudens
123. What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose. ~Willa Cather
124. When my daughter was about seven years old, she asked me one day what I did at work. I told her I worked at the college - that my job was to teach people how to draw. She stared at me, incredulous, and said, "You mean they forget?" ~Howard Ikemoto
125. When painting, an artist must take care not to trap his soul in the canvas. ~Dena Groquet
126. While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt. ~Odilon Redon
127. Why should I paint dead fish, onions and beer glasses? Girls are so much prettier. ~Marie Laurencin
128. Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. ~George Bernard Shaw