Art Quotes

# Emile Zola

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

# Scott Adams

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

# Jerzy Kosinski

The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.

# Georgia O’Keeffe

I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.

# Jonathan Swift

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

# Isaac Bashevis Singer

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

# Thomas Wolfe

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.

# Twyla Tharp

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.

# Alfred Eisenstaedt

When I have a camera in my hand, I know no fear.

# Paul Klee

A line is a dot that went for a walk.

# Le Corbusier

I prefer drawing to talking. Drawing is faster, and leaves less room for lies.

# Vincent Van Gogh

If you hear a voice within you say ‘you cannot paint,’ then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.

# Edgar Degas

Painting is easy when you don’t know how, but very difficult when you do.

# Pablo Picasso

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

# Rene Magritte

Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.

# Andrew Wyeth

One’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes.

# James Whistler

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

# Horace

A picture is a poem without words.

# Robert Mapplethorpe

To make pictures big is to make them more powerful.

# Pierre Bonnard

A painting that is well composed is half finished.

# Dorothea Lange

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

# Friedrich Nietzsche

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

# Henry David Thoreau

This world is but a canvas to our imagination.

# Edward Dmytryk

In art, the obvious is a sin.

# Amy Lowell

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

# Ansel Adams

You don’t take a photograph, you make it.

# Arthur Schopenhauer

Treat a work of art like a prince. Let it speak to you first.

# Stephen Sondheim

Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.

# Henry Ward Beecher

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

# Thomas Merton

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

# Stella Adler

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.

# Don Miguel Ruiz

Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.

# Gustave Flaubert

Of all lies, art is the least untrue.

# Charles Eames

Art resides in the quality of doing, process is not magic.

# Pablo Picasso

Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun.

# Andy Warhol

I’m afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.

# Robert Schumann

To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist.

# Claude Monet

Color is my day-long obsession, joy and torment.

# Ernst Fischer

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

# Friedrich Schiller

Art is the right hand of Nature. The latter has only given us being, the former has made us men.

# Ansel Adams

There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.

# Leonardo da Vinci

A beautiful body perishes, but a work of art dies not.

# Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

# Charles Horton Cooley

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one.

# Aristotle

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.

# Gilbert K. Chesterton

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Quintilian

The perfection of art is to conceal art.

# Pablo Picasso

The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.

# Clara Schumann

My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.

# Gwendolyn Brooks

Art hurts. Art urges voyages – and it is easier to stay at home.

# Gian Carlo Menotti

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.

# Oscar Wilde

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

# John Updike

What art offers is space – a certain breathing room for the spirit.

# J. Paul Getty

My love of fine art increased – the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see.

# Agnes Martin

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

# Ralph Waldo Emerson

Every artist was first an amateur.

# George Bernard Shaw

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.

# Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.

# Theodore Dreiser

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.

# Pierre Bonnard

Draw your pleasure, paint your pleasure, and express your pleasure strongly.

# William Morris Hunt

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her.

# Ad Reinhardt

Art is Art. Everything else is everything else.

# Lucius Annaeus Seneca

All art is but imitation of nature.

# Alexander Calder

To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there’s no such thing as perfect.

# John Berger

What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.

# Marcel Duchamp

I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.

# Paul Gauguin

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

# Paul Strand

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.

# Jackie Kennedy

I don’t understand it. Jack will spend any amount of money to buy votes but he balks at investing a thousand dollars in a beautiful painting.

# Paul Cezanne

Art is a harmony parallel with nature.

# Michelangelo

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.

# Friedrich Nietzsche

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

# Charles Bukowski

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

# Robert Musil

Layer by layer art strips life bare.

# Alexander Pope

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

# Edgar Degas

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

# E. M. Forster

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.

# David Hockney

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.

# Joan Miro

The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.

# Hedy Lamarr

A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.

# David Hockney

Art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus.

# Andre Gide

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

# Walt Whitman

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

# Ralph Waldo Emerson

In art, the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can imagine.

# Michelangelo

The marble not yet carved can hold the form of every thought the greatest artist has.

# Oscar Wilde

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

# Leo Tolstoy

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

# Robert Rauschenberg

The artist’s job is to be a witness to his time in history.

# Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.

# Elbert Hubbard

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

# Arne Jacobsen

If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.

# Agnes Martin

When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection.

# Alexander Pope

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

# Barbra Streisand

I’ve been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details for any artist to be good.

# E. M. Forster

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.

# John Ruskin

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

# Eugene Delacroix

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.

# Jackson Pollock

Painting is self-discovery. Every good artist paints what he is.

# Jackson Pollock

I have no fear of making changes, destroying the image, etc., because the painting has a life of its own.

# Ambrose Bierce

Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art.

# Diane Arbus

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.

# Alfred Eisenstaedt

It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.

# Joshua Reynolds

A room hung with pictures is a room hung with thoughts.

# Khalil Gibran

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.

# Balthus

One must always draw, draw with the eyes, when one cannot draw with a pencil.

# Roy Lichtenstein

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

# Frank Lloyd Wright

Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

# Constantin Stanislavski

Love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art.

# Michelangelo

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

# John Ruskin

Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.

# Federico Fellini

All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.

# Eugene Ionesco

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

# David Hockney

I had always planned to make a large painting of the early spring, when the first leaves are at the bottom of the trees, and they seem to float in space in a wonderful way. But the arrival of spring can’t be done in one picture.

# George Santayana

An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.

# Paul Valery

An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it.

# Philip Guston

To paint is a possessing rather than a picturing.

# Egon Schiele

Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal.

# Andy Warhol

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.

# Pablo Picasso

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

# Robert Delaunay

Painting is by nature a luminous language.

# Theodor W. Adorno

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.

# Samuel Butler

The history of art is the history of revivals.

# Francis Ford Coppola

I don’t think there’s any artist of any value who doesn’t doubt what they’re doing.

# Paul Cezanne

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

# Ralph Waldo Emerson

Pictures must not be too picturesque.

# Henry Moore

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.

# Lincoln Steffens

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

# Theodor W. Adorno

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

# Salvador Dali

Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.

# William Morris

I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.

# Octavio Paz

Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers… What we call art is a game.

# Friedrich Schiller

Art is the daughter of freedom.

# George Edward Moore

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

# Albert Camus

A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.

# Saul Bellow

What is art but a way of seeing?

# Andre Gide

Art begins with resistance – at the point where resistance is overcome. No human masterpiece has ever been created without great labor.

# Gertrude Stein

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

# Igor Stravinsky

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

# Robert Delaunay

Impressionism; it is the birth of Light in painting.

# Al Capp

Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

# Hans Hofmann

Through a painting we can see the whole world.

# John Ciardi

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

# Marshall McLuhan

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

# D. H. Lawrence

The business of art is to reveal the relation between man and his environment.

# Unknown

A picture is worth a thousand words.

# Michelangelo

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle.

# Novalis

The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.

# Elbert Hubbard

The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed – it is a process of elimination.

# Robert Rauschenberg

You begin with the possibilities of the material.

# Henri Matisse

I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.

# Paul Cezanne

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

# Henry Moore

A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.

# Henri Cartier-Bresson

To me, photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event.

# Robert Smithson

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

# Damien Hirst

In an artwork you’re always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.

# Marshall McLuhan

Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century.

# Paul Klee

One eye sees, the other feels.

# Jean Rostand

Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.

# Frank Zappa

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

# Jean Cocteau

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

# Gilbert K. Chesterton

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.

# Robert Mapplethorpe

When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God.

# Jerzy Kosinski

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.

# Andre Malraux

Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man’s fate.

# Winston Churchill

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

# Jim Dine

My attitude towards drawing is not necessarily about drawing. It’s about making the best kind of image I can make, it’s about talking as clearly as I can.

# Francis Bacon

Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.

# John Cheever

Art is the triumph over chaos.

# Leonardo da Vinci

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

# Raoul Dufy

My eyes were made to erase all that is ugly.

# Alfred Sisley

Every picture shows a spot with which the artist has fallen in love.

# Ernst Fischer

I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.

# Anatole France

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

# Langston Hughes

An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose.

# Philip Guston

Painting seems like some kind of peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again.

# George Sand

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

# Jackson Pollock

The modern artist is working with space and time, and expressing his feelings rather than illustrating.

# Salvador Dali

The terrifying and edible beauty of Art Nouveau architecture.

# Chuck Close

Painting is the most magical of mediums. The transcendence is truly amazing to me every time I go to a museum and I see how somebody figured another way to rub colored dirt on a flat surface and make space where there is no space or make you think of a life experience.

# Edward Hopper

What I wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

# Gilbert K. Chesterton

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

# Henri Cartier-Bresson

The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.

# Miguel de Unamuno

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

# George Lucas

All art is dependent on technology because it’s a human endeavour, so even when you’re using charcoal on a wall or designed the proscenium arch, that’s technology.

# Francis Bacon

The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.

# Oscar Wilde

It is through art, and through art only, that we can realise our perfection.

# Sarah McLachlan

Trying to force creativity is never good.

# John Singer Sargent

You can’t do sketches enough. Sketch everything and keep your curiosity fresh.

# Tadao Ando

My hand is the extension of the thinking process – the creative process.

# Henri Matisse

With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft.

# Franz Liszt

Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.

# Lewis Mumford

To curb the machine and limit art to handicraft is a denial of opportunity.

# Anton Chekhov

There is nothing new in art except talent.

# Theodore Bikel

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

# Ellen Key

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

# Marcel Proust

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

# Kate Chopin

To be an artist includes much; one must possess many gifts – absolute gifts – which have not been acquired by one’s own effort. And, moreover, to succeed, the artist much possess the courageous soul.

# Auguste Rodin

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need.

# Abraham Lincoln

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

# Georges Braque

There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.

# John James Audubon

The worse my drawings were, the more beautiful did the originals appear.

# Havelock Ellis

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

# Robert Rauschenberg

An empty canvas is full.

# Jackson Pollock

Every good painter paints what he is.

# Henri Matisse

Drawing is like making an expressive gesture with the advantage of permanence.

# Jodie Foster

I think an artist’s responsibility is more complex than people realize.

# Barbara Hepworth

I rarely draw what I see. I draw what I feel in my body.

# Harry S Truman

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

# William Hazlitt

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

# Jean Cocteau

An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original.

# Robert Delaunay

Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint.

# Albert Camus

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

# Herbert Read

Art is pattern informed by sensibility.

# Charles de Lint

The best artists know what to leave out.

# Anish Kapoor

Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.

# Ambrose Bierce

Painting, n.: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather, and exposing them to the critic.

# Arthur Erickson

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.

# Elizabeth Bowen

Art is one thing that can go on mattering once it has stopped hurting.

# John F. Kennedy

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

# Jerry Saltz

Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools – only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art.

# Flannery O’Connor

The basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode.

# Kiki Smith

Artists live in unknown spaces and give themselves over to following something unknown.

# Salvador Dali

Painting is an infinitely minute part of my personality.

# Oscar Wilde

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.

# W. Somerset Maugham

The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill.

# James Taylor

That’s the motivation of an artist – to seek attention of some kind.

# David Rockefeller

The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes.

# Gustave Flaubert

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

# Alfred Stieglitz

The goal of art was the vital expression of self.

# Roy Lichtenstein

Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms.

# Nathaniel Hawthorne

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

# Donald Judd

Most art is fragile and some should be placed and never moved away.

# Henri Matisse

Impressionism is the newspaper of the soul.

# M. C. Escher

Are you really sure that a floor can’t also be a ceiling?

# Francoise Sagan

Art must take reality by surprise.

# Giotto di Bondone

Every painting is a voyage into a sacred harbour.

# Walt Disney

I never called my work an ‘art’. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.

# Mary Schmich

Good art is art that allows you to enter it from a variety of angles and to emerge with a variety of views.

# Ezra Pound

All great art is born of the metropolis.

# Jim Hodges

When I make art, I think about its ability to connect with others, to bring them into the process.

# Alfred de Vigny

Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.

# Dale Carnegie

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

# Carl Rogers

The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.

# Iris Murdoch

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

# Henry Kissinger

Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.

# Louis Dudek

Art is anything people do with distinction.

# Corita Kent

That’s why people listen to music or look at paintings. To get in touch with that wholeness.

# Logan Pearsall Smith

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

# Ellen Key

When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one’s imagination.

# J. Paul Getty

The beauty one can find in art is one of the pitifully few real and lasting products of human endeavor.

# Ludwig van Beethoven

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

# Marc Chagall

Great art picks up where nature ends.

# Edgard Varese

Contrary to general belief, an artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.

# Francis Ford Coppola

Art depends on luck and talent.

# J. D. Salinger

An artist’s only concern is to shoot for some kind of perfection, and on his own terms, not anyone else’s.

# James Huneker

Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.

# Claude Debussy

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

# Isaac Bashevis Singer

Every creator painfully experiences the chasm between his inner vision and its ultimate expression.

# W. Somerset Maugham

Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.

# Jean Cocteau

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

# Albert Einstein

I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.

# Jean Cocteau

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

# Wassily Kandinsky

An empty canvas is a living wonder… far lovelier than certain pictures.

# Lionel Trilling

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

# Raoul Dufy

What I wish to show when I paint is the way I see things with my eyes and in my heart.

# Paul Gauguin

Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?

# Helen Hayes

I cry out for order and find it only in art.

# Kary Mullis

Art is subject to arbitrary fashion. –

# Wilson Mizner

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

# Carroll O’Connor

Even a true artist does not always produce art.

# Paul Klee

The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.

# Robert Quillen

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

# Ansel Adams

Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.

# Vladimir Nabokov

A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.

# Beck

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother’s face, her aspect and her attitude.

# Ad Reinhardt

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

# Sol LeWitt

When artists make art, they shouldn’t question whether it is permissible to do one thing or another.

# Jackson Pollock

My painting does not come from the easel.

# Jay Kay

I’m not gonna give the British Government the joy of keeping taxing me. They don’t tax art. And all my cars are just a collection of art.

# Hendrik Willem Van Loon

The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.

# Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

In art the best is good enough.

# Marvin Gaye

Great artists suffer for the people.

# Alfred Eisenstaedt

We are only beginning to learn what to say in a photograph. The world we live in is a succession of fleeting moments, any one of which might say something significant.

# Georges Braque

Painting is a nail to which I fasten my ideas.

# Charles Dudley Warner

A great artist can paint a great picture on a small canvas.

# William Morris

If you cannot learn to love real art, at least learn to hate sham art and reject it.

# Henri Matisse

Time extracts various values from a painter’s work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is.

# Iris Murdoch

All art is a struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.

# Leo Tolstoy

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.

# Gustave Courbet

I hope to live all my life for my art, without abandoning my principles one iota.

# Wilson Mizner

Art is science made clear.

# Peter De Vries

Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.

# Albert Einstein

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

# Edward Steichen

Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.

# Robert Motherwell

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

# Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.

# Peter Max

I never know what I’m going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I’m just the middleman.

# Camille Pissarro

Paint the essential character of things.

# Louis Kahn

Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.

# Willem de Kooning

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

# Alexander Calder

I paint with shapes.

# Edward Steichen

When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.

# Cyril Connolly

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.

# Marc Chagall

When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it – a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand – as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it’s bad art.

# Conrad Hall

Painting and writing are solitary arts.

# Hippocrates

Life is short, the art long.

# Honore de Balzac

If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.

# Edward Steichen

Every other artist begins with a blank canvas, a piece of paper the photographer begins with the finished product.

# Grandma Moses

If you know somethin’ well, you can always paint it but people would be better off buyin’ chickens.

# Robert Indiana

I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I’ve done many.

# Robert Indiana

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem, with each painting being a single stanza.

# Emily Carr

Be careful that you do not write or paint anything that is not your own, that you don’t know in your own soul.

# William Wordsworth

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

# Maurice Chevalier

An artist carries on throughout his life a mysterious, uninterrupted conversation with his public.

# Constantin Brancusi

There hasn’t been any art yet. Art is just beginning.

# Tennessee Williams

All good art is an indiscretion.

# George Henry Lewes

Insight is the first condition of Art.

# William Butler Yeats

I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.

# Agnes Martin

My paintings are not about what is seen. They are about what is known forever in the mind.

# Rudyard Kipling

It’s clever, but is it Art?

# Arthur Erickson

Vitality is radiated from exceptional art and architecture.

# Henry Miller

The waking mind is the least serviceable in the arts.

# Robert Indiana

I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists.

# Paul Gauguin

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

# Georges Braque

Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny.

# Laurie Anderson

I’ve never really had a hobby, unless you count art, which the IRS once told me I had to declare as a hobby since I hadn’t made money with it.

# Fran Lebowitz

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.

# David Hockney

What I didn’t know was I was deeply attracted to the big space.

# John Zorn

I see myself and many artists like me as the torchbearers through these dark ages.

# Anais Nin

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.

# Robert Motherwell

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception.

# Max Eastman

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

# Louis Dudek

The philistine provides the best definition of art. Anything that makes him rage is first class.

# Henry Ossawa Tanner

I decided on the spot that I would be an artist, and I assure you, it was no ordinary artist I had in mind.

# Malcolm de Chazal

Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down.

# Lionel Trilling

What marks the artist is his power to shape the material of pain we all have.

# Balthus

Painting is the passage from the chaos of the emotions to the order of the possible.

# Elia Kazan

The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don’t dare reveal.

# Jasper Johns

I am not strong on perfection.

# Alfred de Vigny

Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?

# Henry Ossawa Tanner

I will preach with my brush.

# Dwight D. Eisenhower

Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.

# James Humes

The art of communication is the language of leadership.

# Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.

# John W. Gardner

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

# William Hazlitt

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.

# Christopher Marlowe

O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.

# Mark Van Doren

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.

# Paracelsus

The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician. Therefore the physician must start from nature, with an open mind.

# Dwight D. Eisenhower

Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.

# Robert Owen

All the world old is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.

# Joakim Noah

Art is interesting because there can be so many different perspectives in a piece of art. The way I see it may be completely different than the way somebody else sees it. It’s interesting to hear what somebody sees in a piece of art compared to somebody else. It could be completely different, and that’s interesting to me.

# Ernest Benn

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.

# Havelock Ellis

All the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.

# Paul Hawken

Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.

# Joseph Conrad

Only in men’s imagination does every truth find an effective and undeniable existence. Imagination, not invention, is the supreme master of art as of life.

# JR

Art is not supposed to change the world, to change practical things, but to change perceptions. Art can change the way we see the world. Art can create an analogy.

# Virgil Abloh

Fashion is kinda a joke. I don’t get too bogged down in the clothes. For me, it’s one big art project, just a canvas to show that fashion should have a brand which has someone behind it who cares about different contexts. Social things.

# Andy Warhol

Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

# Keith Haring

I don’t think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.

# Ralph Waldo Emerson

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.

# Marcel Duchamp

What art is, in reality, is this missing link, not the links which exist. It’s not what you see that is art; art is the gap.

# Jean-Michel Basquiat

I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.

# Victor Pinchuk

Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics.

# Philip James Bailey

Simplicity is natures first step, and the last of art.

# Julia Morgan

Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.

# Brandon Boyd

Art is everywhere, and everywhere is art.

# Henri Poincare

Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things.

# John Wooden

Be true to yourself, help others, make each day your masterpiece, make friendship a fine art, drink deeply from good books – especially the Bible, build a shelter against a rainy day, give thanks for your blessings and pray for guidance every day.

# William Osler

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

# Valentino Rossi

Riding a race bike is an art – a thing that you do because you feel something inside.

# Frank Lloyd Wright

The mother art is architecture. Without an architecture of our own we have no soul of our own civilization.

# George Bernard Shaw

You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.

# Andrei Tarkovsky

An artist never works under ideal conditions. If they existed, his work wouldn’t exist, for the artist doesn’t live in a vacuum. Some sort of pressure must exist. The artist exists because the world is not perfect. Art would be useless if the world were perfect, as man wouldn’t look for harmony but would simply live in it.

# Octavia E. Butler

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.

# Philip Johnson

Architecture is the art of how to waste space.

# Sun Tzu

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

# Lady Bird Johnson

Art is the window to man’s soul. Without it, he would never be able to see beyond his immediate world; nor could the world see the man within.

# Helen Frankenthaler

There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.

# Leonardo da Vinci

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

# Mos Def

African art is functional, it serves a purpose. It’s not a dormant. It’s not a means to collect the largest cheering section. It should be healing, a source a joy. Spreading positive vibrations.

# Ossie Davis

Any form of art is a form of power; it has impact, it can affect change – it can not only move us, it makes us move.

# Martin Luther

Beautiful music is the art of the prophets that can calm the agitations of the soul; it is one of the most magnificent and delightful presents God has given us.

# Henri Matisse

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter – a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

# Russell Simmons

Art is a way to express yourself and through that you can escape a bad situation.

# Beatrice Wood

And I have exposed myself to art so that my work has something beyond just the usual potter.

# Paul Rand

Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions; there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.

# John Lasseter

The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.

# Frederic Chopin

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

# Don Marquis

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.

# Will Rogers

Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘Nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.

# Douglas Horton

The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.

# Walter Savage Landor

Music is God’s gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven.

# Jawaharlal Nehru

The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds.

# Dante Alighieri

Nature is the art of God.

# Malcolm Forbes

Diversity: the art of thinking independently together.

# George Bernard Shaw

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

# Thomas Berger

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

# Harvey Fierstein

Art has the power to transform, to illuminate, to educate, inspire and motivate.

# Albert Einstein

It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.

# Thornton Wilder

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

# William Morris

History has remembered the kings and warriors, because they destroyed; art has remembered the people, because they created.

# Richards

Creative without strategy is called ‘art.’ Creative with strategy is called ‘advertising.’ Jef I.

# Voltaire

The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.

# George Edward Moore

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.

# Tony Blair

The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes.

# Paulo Coelho

I have seen many storms in my life. Most storms have caught me by surprise, so I had to learn very quickly to look further and understand that I am not capable of controlling the weather, to exercise the art of patience and to respect the fury of nature.

# Oscar Wilde

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

# Ashton Kutcher

Vulnerability is the essence of romance. It’s the art of being uncalculated, the willingness to look foolish, the courage to say, ‘This is me, and I’m interested in you enough to show you my flaws with the hope that you may embrace me for all that I am but, more important, all that I am not.’

# Albert Ellis

The art of love is largely the art of persistence.

# Frank Lloyd Wright

Simplicity and repose are the qualities that measure the true value of any work of art.

# Henry Ward Beecher

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.

# Jacques Prevert

Our Father which art in heaven – Stay there – And we will stay on earth – Which is sometimes so pretty.

# Hippocrates

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.

# Arsene Wenger

Football is an art, like dancing is an art – but only when it’s well done does it become an art.

# William James

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

# Lord Byron

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.

# August Wilson

All art is political in the sense that it serves someone’s politics.

# Harold Coffin

Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own.

# Groucho Marx

Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

# Theodor W. Adorno

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.

# Paul Cezanne

A work of art which did not begin in emotion is not art.

# Roy Lichtenstein

Pop Art looks out into the world. It doesn’t look like a painting of something, it looks like the thing itself.

# Friedrich Nietzsche

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

# Beverly Sills

Art is the signature of civilizations.

# Madonna Ciccone

I am my own experiment. I am my own work of art.

# Gustave Flaubert

You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the harm that is spoken of it.

# Balthus

I refuse to confide and don’t like it when people write about art.

# Tom Stoppard

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

# Boris Pasternak

Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.

# Daniel Bell

Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination.

# Ulysses S. Grant

The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.

# Otto von Bismarck

Politics is the art of the possible.

# Conor Oberst

Art is essentially communication. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum. That’s why people make art, so other people can relate to it.

# Theo Jansen

The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.

# Jacques Barzun

Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.

# Jean-Luc Godard

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

# Samuel Butler

Life is not an exact science, it is an art.

# Kurt Vonnegut

The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake.

# Lee Strasberg

Art is longer than life.

# Paracelsus

Medicine is not only a science; it is also an art. It does not consist of compounding pills and plasters; it deals with the very processes of life, which must be understood before they may be guided.

# Ludwig Erhard

A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece.

# Albert Einstein

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

# Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

In life, as in art, the beautiful moves in curves.

# Chinua Achebe

Art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

# Glenn Gould

The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.

# Jan Vogler

Art is what defines us, what makes us human.

# Michael Korda

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

# Juice Wrld

It is hard to separate the art from the artist.

# Dasha Zhukova

I have had an interest in art since childhood. I loved to draw as a child and still do.

# Danica McKellar

One of the most amazing things about mathematics is the people who do math aren’t usually interested in application, because mathematics itself is truly a beautiful art form. It’s structures and patterns, and that’s what we love, and that’s what we get off on.

# Elliott Erwitt

To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.

# William Bernbach

Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.

# Eddie Vedder

It’s an art to live with pain… mix the light into gray.

# Andrew Stanton

Art is messy, art is chaos – so you need a system.

# Emily Ratajkowski

I did go to UCLA for art, but the other option was going to Sarah Lawrence and doing creative writing all the way. So that is part of the reason I love to read so much.

# Lupita Nyong’o

Clay can be dirt in the wrong hands, but clay can be art in the right hands.

# Isaac Newton

Tact is the art of making a point without making an enemy.

# Guy Kawasaki

Patience is the art of concealing your impatience.

# Andy Warhol

I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.

# Emily Carr

I think that one’s art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.

# Michael Moore

The purpose of art actually is, in many cases, to make you feel quite uncomfortable. Or at least to go to that place that’s already of discomfort inside of you and tap into that.

# Jimmy Carter

Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.

# Henry Moore

Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is nature.

# K. D. Lang

Look. Art knows no prejudice, art knows no boundaries, art doesn’t really have judgement in it’s purest form. So just go, just go.

# Reed Morano

A lot of cinematography is intuition. It’s an art, not a formula.

# Ludwig van Beethoven

Don’t only practice your art, but force your way into its secrets; art deserves that, for it and knowledge can raise man to the Divine.

# Roy Lichtenstein

The importance of art is in the process of doing it, in the learning experience where the artist interacts with whatever is being made.

# Christian Marclay

Art is all in the details.

# Jerry Saltz

Art is for anyone. It just isn’t for everyone. Still, over the past decade, its audience has hugely grown, and that’s irked those outside the art world, who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.

# O. Henry

Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving!

# John Donne

Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so. For, those, whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow. Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

# Simon McBurney

Theatre is the art form of the present: it exists only in the present, and then it’s gone.

# James Montgomery

Blue thou art, intensely blue; Flower, whence came thy dazzling hue?

# Alan Moore

Art makes us feel less alone. It makes us think: somebody else has thought this, somebody else has had these feelings.

# Olivia Newton-John

Nature is the most beautiful thing we have. It’s better than art because it’s from the creator.

# H. L. Mencken

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

# Christo

The work of art is a scream of freedom.

# Modest Mussorgsky

Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity.

# Al Jourgensen

We have to support our local artists. It’s just that simple. Otherwise, we will have no art.

# Ray Bradbury

Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.

# Andy Warhol

Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.

# Saint Ambrose

Many a sin has sullied me in body and in soul because I did not restrain my thoughts nor guard my lips: nevertheless it is to Thee, O God of majesty and love, that I turn in my extremity, for Thou art the fount of mercy; to Thee, as quickly as I may, I speed: for Thou alone canst heal me; I take refuge under Thy protection.

# Thomas Hardy

Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.

# Marilyn Manson

I think it’s the pain and suffering that drive you to become an artist. The art itself should be the pain, sort of exorcising every demon and making you feel like you’re a person that matters.

# Thich Nhat Hanh

It’s very important that we re-learn the art of resting and relaxing. Not only does it help prevent the onset of many illnesses that develop through chronic tension and worrying; it allows us to clear our minds, focus, and find creative solutions to problems.

# Alvar Aalto

Building art is a synthesis of life in materialised form. We should try to bring in under the same hat not a splintered way of thinking, but all in harmony together.

# Barbara Kruger

I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I’m trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level.

# David Hilbert

The art of doing mathematics consists in finding that special case which contains all the germs of generality.

# Anatole France

The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards.

# Henry Louis Gates

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

# Ted Shawn

Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made.

# Susanne Langer

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

# Norman McLaren

Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.

# Tim Crouch

Art is a subjective thing, and it should be a subjective thing. And the difficulty of subjectivity is that it becomes hugely problematized when you start applying large sums of money to art objects. That’s where it all starts to get a bit sticky.

# Virgil Abloh

Art is made in hindsight.

# Keith Haring

Art is for everybody.

# Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is the proper task of life.

# Stan Getz

As far as playing jazz, no other art form, other than conversation, can give the satisfaction of spontaneous interaction.

# Pablo Picasso

Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

# Eddie Vedder

I think music is the greatest art form that exists, and I think people listen to music for different reasons, and it serves different purposes. Some of it is background music, and some of it is things that might affect a person’s day, if not their life, or change an attitude. The best songs are the ones that make you feel something.

# Maria Sibylla Merian

Art and nature shall always be wrestling until they eventually conquer one another so that the victory is the same stroke and line: that which is conquered, conquers at the same time.

# Charles Baudelaire

Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable.

# Sun Tzu

The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.

# Ansel Adams

Photography is more than a medium for factual communication of ideas. It is a creative art.

# Bjarke Ingels

In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.

# Samuel Butler

Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.

# C. S. Lewis

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

# Edward Hopper

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

# Jessye Norman

If I were not able to separate the art from the artists, I think I would limit myself a great deal, and life wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.

# Ambrose Bierce

Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

# Isaac Newton

Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.

# Adriano Zumbo

Whether it’s a leaf from a tree, the supermarket or person, everything is art and movement, it’s all inspiration.

# Leonardo da Vinci

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.

# Hunter S. Thompson

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

# Claude Monet

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

# Chris Bangle

We at BMW do not build cars as consumer objects, just to drive from A to B. We build mobile works of art.

# Gustave Flaubert

The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.

# Sushant Singh Rajput

I think people generally are lost, as they keep thinking about what is going to happen and what they have done. They are not alive anymore. The art of listening is missing. In their head, they are doing something else.

# Thomas Shadwell

Words may be false and full of art; Sighs are the natural language of the heart.

# Larry Rivers

Any art communicates what you’re in the mood to receive.

# Oscar Wilde

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.

# Ani DiFranco

Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.

# Tony Hawk

I consider skateboarding an art form, a lifestyle and a sport. ‘Action sport’ would be the least offensive categorization.

# Patti Smith

In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.

# Alfred North Whitehead

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

# Jerry Saltz

The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years.

# Kevin Brownlow

Silent pictures show us how we lived and what our attitudes were. And as an art form, they can be wonderfully entertaining and often inspirational.

# Yayoi Kusama

I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.

# Andy Warhol

Land really is the best art.

# Damien Hirst

People don’t like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary – I can’t really see a difference.

# Martin Luther

Next to the Word of God, the noble art of music is the greatest treasure in the world.

# Norman Rockwell

Some people have been kind enough to call me a fine artist. I’ve always called myself an illustrator. I’m not sure what the difference is. All I know is that whatever type of work I do, I try to give it my very best. Art has been my life.

# Gustav Klimt

All art is erotic.

# William Dunbar

London, thou art the flower of cities all!

# John Constable

The world is wide. No two days are alike, nor even two hours, neither were there ever two leaves of a tree alike since the creation of all the world; and the genuine productions of art, like those of nature, are all distinct from each other.

# Philip James Bailey

Art is man’s nature; nature is God’s art.

# Wassily Kandinsky

There is no must in art because art is free.

# Samuel Johnson

The true art of memory is the art of attention.

# Orson Welles

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

# Nipsey Hussle

I believe that economics is based on scarcity of markets. And it’s possible to monetize your art without compromising the integrity of it for commerce.

# Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The building art is, in reality, always the spatial execution of spiritual decisions. It is bound to its times and manifests itself only in addressing vital tasks with the means of its times. A knowledge of the times, its tasks, and its means is the necessary precondition of work in the building art.

# Yoko Ono

Controversy is part of the nature of art and creativity.

# Wale

The ability to make somebody feel something: that’s art. However you look at it, whether you’re an author, a painter, a singer, a rapper, a spoken-word artist – art.

# Nathan Myhrvold

Cooking is an art, but all art requires knowing something about the techniques and materials. Using modernist techniques, you get more control, and that allows you to be more artistic, not less!

# Graham Nelson

I don’t really believe in ‘directions’ in art; the rope twists as you follow it, that’s all.

# Jean Arp

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother’s womb.

# Chuck Close

Part of the joy of looking at art is getting in sync in some ways with the decision-making process that the artist used and the record that’s embedded in the work.

# W. H. Auden

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

# Barry Jenkins

Art is inherently political. Even trying to make a film that has nothing to do with politics is, in and of itself, a political act.

# Alfred North Whitehead

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

# Evelyn de Morgan

Art is eternal, but life is short.

# Marc Chagall

In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.

# Erykah Badu

I’m free. I just do what I want, say what I want, say how I feel, and I don’t try to hurt nobody. I just try to make sure that I don’t compromise my art in any kind of way, and I think people respect that.

# Carl Honore

In our fast-forward culture, we have lost the art of eating well. Food is often little more than fuel to pour down the hatch while doing other stuff – surfing the Web, driving, walking along the street. Dining al desko is now the norm in many workplaces. All of this speed takes a toll. Obesity, eating disorders and poor nutrition are rife.

# James Cash Penney

The art of effective listening is essential to clear communication, and clear communication is necessary to management success.

# D. H. Lawrence

The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.

# Ani DiFranco

Art is why I get up in the morning but my definition ends there. You know I don’t think its fair that I’m living for something I can’t even define.

# Cesare Pavese

The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.

# Virgil Abloh

All I do all day is think of ideas and implement them. That’s an industry, you know. I’m trying to make art on a commercial scale.

# Jean-Michel Basquiat

I don’t listen to what art critics say. I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.

# Angelus Silesius

By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound.

# Cherie Lunghi

I enjoy art, architecture, museums, churches and temples; anything that gives me insight into the history and soul of the place I’m in. I can also be a beach bum – I like to laze in the shade of a palm tree with a good book or float in a warm sea at sundown.

# Pablo Picasso

Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.

# Liam Cunningham

The best kind of art or writing holds up a mirror to society.

# Dan Flavin

One might not think of light as a matter of fact, but I do. And it is, as I said, as plain and open and direct an art as you will ever find.

# Steve Prefontaine

A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways they’re capable of understanding.

# Ed Koch

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

# Luc de Clapiers

Patience is the art of hoping.

# Franz Marc

Art is nothing but the expression of our dream; the more we surrender to it the closer we get to the inner truth of things, our dream-life, the true life that scorns questions and does not see them.

# Don Simpson

We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. Our obligation is to make money.

# Walter Murch

Film editing is now something almost everyone can do at a simple level and enjoy it, but to take it to a higher level requires the same dedication and persistence that any art form does.

# Francisco Goya

In art, there is no need for color; I see only light and shade. Give me a crayon, and I will paint your portrait.

# Martin Amis

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without thorn.

# Josef Albers

In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is – as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art.

# John Waters

I like the elitism of the art world. I think art for the people is a terrible idea.

# Piet Mondrian

Let us note that art – even on an abstract level – has never been confined to ‘idea’; art has always been the ‘realized’ expression of equilibrium.

# John Wesley Powell

The wonders of the Grand Canyon cannot be adequately represented in symbols of speech, nor by speech itself. The resources of the graphic art are taxed beyond their powers in attempting to portray its features. Language and illustration combined must fail.

# Tom Ford

I love to design. I am a commercial fashion designer. I always design jackets with two sleeves. I don’t design jackets with three sleeves, or the layers and layers come off like little dolls from Russia. Fashion for me is a creative endeavor, but it is not art for me.

# Napoleon Bonaparte

You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.

# Bat for Lashes

When I was young, I wanted to be a writer or painter. I was always writing stories, and I excelled at drawing. My teachers encouraged my art work. When I was 9 or 10, I began learning piano and started writing music.

# William Morris

So long as the system of competition in the production and exchange of the means of life goes on, the degradation of the arts will go on; and if that system is to last for ever, then art is doomed, and will surely die; that is to say, civilization will die.

# Denise Morrison

Food is art and science. So, you take something out, you have to work with the recipe to make sure that you’re providing delicious food with cleaner labels.

# Mason Cooley

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.

# Donald Knuth

Science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do.

# Gilbert K. Chesterton

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

# Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

Art and science have their meeting point in method.

# Tom Wolfe

The modern notion of art is an essentially religious or magical one in which the artist is viewed as a holy beast who in some way, big or small, receives flashes from the godhead, which is known as creativity.

# W. E. B. Du Bois

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.

# Alan Rickman

If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust.

# Maya Lin

I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That’s art to me.

# Bernie Siegel

Feelings aroused by the touch of someone’s hand, the sound of music, the smell of a flower, a beautiful sunset, a work of art, love, laughter, hope and faith – all work on both the unconscious and the conscious aspects of the self, and they have physiological consequences as well.

# Marcel Marceau

Mime is an art beyond words. It is the art of the essential. And you cannot lie. You have to show the truth.

# Albert Camus

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.

# John Lautner

To me, architecture is an art, naturally, and it isn’t architecture unless it’s alive. Alive is what art is. If it’s not alive, it’s dead, and it’s not art.

# Duke Ellington

Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don’t want it.

# Nick Cave

I’m very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It’s the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.

# Keith Urban

I think everybody has different priorities in their life. People live their lives differently. People become famous through all sorts of different reasons… some of it through art and some of it through just wanting to be famous. And I think how that all starts tends to reflect how you live your life daily.

# David Frost

Diplomacy, n. is the art of letting somebody else have your way.

# Tavi Gevinson

Fashion intersects a lot with art and film and music, and that was appealing to me. I read a bunch of fashion blogs and wanted to be part of the community.

# Alice Walker

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

# Otto Dix

All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too; the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order; order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.

# Oscar Wilde

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

# A. Bartlett Giamatti

Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.

# John Updike

Professionalism in art has this difficulty: To be professional is to be dependable, to be dependable is to be predictable, and predictability is esthetically boring – an anti-virtue in a field where we hope to be astonished and startled and at some deep level refreshed.

# Neil deGrasse Tyson

Let’s say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can’t do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.

# Josef Albers

Ah, the creative process is the same secret in science as it is in art. They are all the same absolutely.

# Yayoi Kusama

With just one polka dot, nothing can be achieved. In the universe, there is the sun, the moon, the earth, and hundreds of millions of stars. All of us live in the unfathomable mystery and infinitude of the universe. Pursuing ‘philosophy of the universe’ through art under such circumstances has led me to what I call ‘stereotypical repetition.’

# bell hooks

I feel that my environment reflects my belief in the grace and art and elegance of living simply.

# William Blake

He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.

# Madonna Ciccone

I like to change. A new lamp, a piece of art, can transform a room.

# Skepta

Pirate radio is like street art.

# Herbie Hancock

Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.

# James Acaster

People like abstract art because it makes them feel clever.

# Gloria Steinem

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.

# Anouska Hempel

I feel that, historically, the Art Deco period has the most resonance for me. As a person, it has to be the plucky Clara Bow, the heroine of American silent movies of the 1920s. She embodied feminine dressing mixed with men’s style. All this then evolved into the exquisite style and simplicity of Coco Chanel.

# Albrecht Durer

As I grew older, I realized that it was much better to insist on the genuine forms of nature, for simplicity is the greatest adornment of art.

# Lady Gaga

Art is going to make a bigger comeback than ever. That’s the upside to things getting challenging.

# Charles Baudelaire

Modernity is the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, which make up one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immutable. This transitory fugitive element, which is constantly changing, must not be despised or neglected.

# Mickalene Thomas

I define my work as a feminist act and a political act because I’m black and a woman. You don’t necessarily have to claim that, but the act of making art itself is a political and feminist act when you’re a woman.

# Victoria Osteen

When God created you, He went to great lengths to make you exactly the way He wanted you to be. You are His ultimate work of art.

# Sonam Kapoor

Art reflects society. Cinema doesn’t dictate – you portray what the society demands.

# Tom Stoppard

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it’s a painting, and if you can walk around it it’s a sculpture.

# Yoko Ono

Art is my life and my life is art.

# Sara Blakely

Shapewear is the canvas and the clothes are the art.

# Ashish Vidyarthi

My mother Reba Vidyarthi was a Kathak dancer while my father Govind Vidyarthi was a theatre personality. Later on, he worked for Sangeet Natak Akademi and documented many dying art forms of India.

# Cyril Connolly

Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.

# David Shields

All art is theft.

# Serge Schmemann

The art of reading between the lines is as old as manipulated information.

# Julia Child

In France, cooking is a serious art form and a national sport.

# Artur Schnabel

The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes ah, that is where the art resides.

# Sylvia Plath

Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.

# Kenny Leon

I always say film is art, theater is life and television is furniture.

# Giorgio de Chirico

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.

# Anthony Trollope

There is no royal road to learning; no short cut to the acquirement of any art.

# Taika Waititi

Visually, I’m always considering shots and composition quite a lot, and I love putting art into films, and I do a lot of the art.

# Amandla Stenberg

I love all kinds of art. I mean, I love sketching and acting and music.

# Nobu Matsuhisa

Making sushi is an art, and experience is everything.

# Jeff Koons

Art to me is a humanitarian act and I believe that there is a responsibility that art should somehow be able to effect mankind, to make the word a better place.

# Jerry Saltz

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.

# Claude Monet

People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.

# Virgil Abloh

Music needs a visual element to make it tangible. So, naturally, there’s gonna be a synergy between high-level art direction and high-level albums.

# Luc de Clapiers

The art of pleasing is the art of deception.

# Samuel Johnson

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.

# Margot Fonteyn

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.

# Damien Hirst

The difference between art about death and actual death is that one’s a celebration and the other’s a dull fact.

# Marilyn Manson

My art is not limited to the songs I create but also to the reaction it creates. I like to sit back and look at the whole thing as if it’s a tornado that I’m controlling. It’s creating chaos. When you create chaos, ideas are turned upside down, and everybody looks at things in a different way.

# Antoni Gaudi

Nothing is art if it does not come from nature.

# Epicurus

The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.

# Thomas Kinkade

Art transcends cultural boundaries.

# Pierre Bonnard

Art will never be able to exist without nature.

# John Dorsey

Drafting is not only an art, but there’s a degree of science as well.

# Ai Weiwei

If my art has nothing to do with people’s pain and sorrow, what is ‘art’ for?

# Yanni

Music is art, and once you become an artist, you need to learn how to accept criticism.

# Maxwell Anderson

If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right.

# Woody Allen

Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.

# Alain de Botton

In ‘Art as Therapy’, we argue that art is a tool that can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand and reawaken us.

# Gunter Grass

Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper.

# Kehinde Wiley

If you look at the paintings that I love in art history, these are the paintings where great, powerful men are being celebrated on the big walls of museums throughout the world. What feels really strange is not to be able to see a reflection of myself in that world.

# Chris Pine

For me, fragrances are very – one of these beautiful art forms that bring about a whole host of things. It’s what you want to smell like, it’s memories that make you smile or are resonant of times in your life, it can remind you of music. If you’re a lover of scent, it’s a very kind of particular and evocative thing.

# Bill Viola

Art is, for me, the process of trying to wake up the soul. Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.

# William Blake

Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.

# Arnold Palmer

What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive.

# Claude Bernard

Art is I; science is we.

# Daniel Barenboim

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

# Cyril Connolly

There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.

# Derek Hough

In school, some of my favorite subjects… I mean, art was my favorite subject. I loved art! I used to go during lunch time to the art room and paint or draw or something.

# Alfred North Whitehead

Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure.

# Malcolm Muggeridge

Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.

# Oscar Wilde

No better way is there to learn to love Nature than to understand Art. It dignifies every flower of the field. And, the boy who sees the thing of beauty which a bird on the wing becomes when transferred to wood or canvas will probably not throw the customary stone.

# Said Nursi

Nature is a divine art; it cannot be the artist. It is a dominical book and cannot be the scribe. It is an embroidery and cannot be the embroiderer. It is a register and cannot be the accountant. It is the law and cannot be the power.

# Wangechi Mutu

I believe art is a connection, like passing on a flame.

# Nicolas Cage

Picasso said, ‘Art is a lie that tells the truth.’ What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?

# Emmanuel Jal

Sometimes words are not needed, and the simplicity of expressing yourself through an art form is one of the best ways of communication.

# Andy Warhol

Art is what you can get away with.

# Keith Haring

You don’t have to know anything about art to appreciate it or to look at it. There aren’t any hidden secrets or things that you’re supposed to understand.

# David Small

Things like anatomy and drawing and design and color had pretty much been drop-kicked out of the curriculum in the ’70s, when I was studying art, in favor of abstraction and minimalism.

# F. Sionil Jose

Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.

# Georges Braque

Art is made to disturb, science reassures.

# Marcel Duchamp

I am still a victim of chess. It has all the beauty of art – and much more. It cannot be commercialized. Chess is much purer than art in its social position.

# Billy Al Bengston

We believed that there’s no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it’s bad, it’s something else. It was a much, much harder line in the ’50s and ’60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn’t exist – they didn’t have a fine arts program when I was a kid.

# Salma Hayek

I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage, to love my first language, Spanish, to learn about Mexican history, music, folk art, food, and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.

# John Kenneth Galbraith

Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

# Susan Vreeland

To me, art begets art. Painting feeds the eye just as poetry feeds the ear, which is to say that both feed the soul.

# David Bowie

Art was, seriously, the only thing I’d ever wanted to own. It has always been for me a stable nourishment. I use it. It can change the way that I feel in the mornings.

# Rabindranath Tagore

What is Art? It is the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the Real.

# Mel Gibson

Acting is like lying. The art of lying well. I’m paid to tell elaborate lies.

# Linda Ronstadt

Art is for healing ourselves, and everybody needs their own personal art to heal up their problems.

# Pablo Picasso

Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs.

# Victor Hugo

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art. In a woman the flesh must be like marble; in a statue the marble must be like flesh.

# Will Durant

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

# Gustave Courbet

The beautiful is in nature, and it is encountered under the most diverse forms of reality. Once it is found it belongs to art, or rather to the artist who discovers it.

# Piet Mondrian

Art is the path to being spiritual.

# Friedrich Nietzsche

Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.

# John Berger

Art is the provocation for talking about enigma and the search for sense in human life. One can do that by telling a story or writing about a fresco by Giotto or studying how a snail climbs up a wall.

# Marianne Moore

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

# Lady Gaga

What I’ve discovered is that in art, as in music, there’s a lot of truth-and then there’s a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth, but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for, my moment. It’s the moment that the audience falls in love.

# Jean Cocteau

Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.

# Charles Baudelaire

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art – that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

# Gloria Estefan

All I tell artists is, ‘Do what you love. Never let anybody talk you into changing what your musical idea is just to try to get a hit, because you’re chasing your tail that way. It’s not going to happen, and if you’re successful, you have to do it the rest of your life. Stay true to it and do it for the sake of the art.’

# Steve Prefontaine

My philosophy is that I’m an artist. I perform an art not with a paint brush or a camera. I perform with bodily movement. Instead of exhibiting my art in a museum or a book or on canvas, I exhibit my art in front of the multitudes.

# Aristotle

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than they who produce them; for these only gave them life, those the art of living well.

# Dev Anand

You create a work of art. You do not know whether it will get public sanction. Sometimes outstanding films do no business, and sometimes films which are not so good work.

# Lindsey Stirling

Sometimes, being different feels a lot like being alone. But with that being said, being true to that and being true to my standards and my way of doing things in my art and my music, everything that has made me feel very different… in the end, it has made me the happiest.

# Simone de Beauvoir

Art is an attempt to integrate evil.

# Jeanette Winterson

Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.

# Don King

Muhammad Ali – he was a magnificent fighter and he was an icon… Every head must bow, every knee must bend, every tongue must confess, thou art the greatest, the greatest of all time, Muhammad, Muhammad Ali.

# Walter Pater

For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake.

# Danny Meyer

You wouldn’t have the same art on the walls at every restaurant or the same waiter uniforms. Neither should you have the same service style at every restaurant.

# Henry Hazlitt

The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.

# Mao Zedong

There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

# Frank Ocean

Art’s everything we hope life would be, a lot of times.

# Caroline Gordon

We do not judge great art. It judges us.

# Charlie Parker

They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.

# James Turrell

We have spent billions to go to the moon – we go to this lesser satellite called the moon and say we are in space, but we are in space right now; we just don’t feel ourselves to be in space. Some forms of art and some forms of spirituality do give us that sense.

# Seamus Heaney

The end of art is peace.

# Julia Cameron

Art used to be made in the name of faith. We made cathedrals, we made stained-glass windows, we made murals.

# Charles Baudelaire

What is art? Prostitution.

# Huston Smith

Every society and religion has rules, for both have moral laws. And the essence of morality consists, as in art, of drawing the line somewhere.

# Lady Gaga

I am a walking piece of art every day, with my dreams and my ambitions forward at all times in an effort to inspire my fans to lead their life in that way.

# Henry James

We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.

# Katherine Johnson

I like to learn. That’s an art and a science.

# Denis Diderot

When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man’s name live for thousands of years.

# Michael Palin

I am not a great cook, I am not a great artist, but I love art, and I love food, so I am the perfect traveller.

# Regina King

If you have the opportunity for your art to meet activism, you shouldn’t pass that up when it comes your way.

# William Shakespeare

There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.

# Lin Yutang

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

# Philip Johnson

Architecture is basically the design of interiors, the art of organizing interior space.

# Michelle Phan

As a young girl, I loved having stories read to me. There is something magical about narration and voiceovers. Recording a voiceover is an art form in itself.

# Diane von Furstenberg

There’s design, and there’s art. Good design is total harmony. There’s no better designer than nature – if you look at a branch or a leaf, it’s perfect. It’s all function. Art is different. It’s about emotion. It’s about suffering and beauty – but mostly suffering!

# Drummond Money-Coutts

Magic touches people in the way great art does. It lets them see the world with new eyes.

# William Hazlitt

Cunning is the art of concealing our own defects, and discovering other people’s weaknesses.

# Keith Haring

Art is nothing if you don’t reach every segment of the people.

# C. S. Lewis

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

# Marcel Duchamp

If your choice enters into it, then taste is involved – bad taste, good taste, uninteresting taste. Taste is the enemy of art, –A-R-T.

# Eugenio Montale

In reality art is always for everyone and for no one.

# Marcus Terentius Varro

Divine Nature gave the fields, human art built the cities.

# Michael Franti

Music has the power to bring people together like no other art form.

# Tony Hawk

I feel like skateboarding is as much of a sport as a lifestyle, and an art form, so there’s so much that that transcends in terms of music, fashion, and entertainment.

# Youssou N’Dour

Politics is politics; art is art. If you play a political role, you have to stop being an artist.

# Maurice Ravel

We should always remember that sensitiveness and emotion constitute the real content of a work of art.

# Charles de Lint

Life is like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning.

# Paul Samuelson

Economics is not an exact science. It’s a combination of an art and elements of science. And that’s almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we’re improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.

# Victor Hugo

Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.

# Aristophanes

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

# Charles Horton Cooley

Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.

# Hillary Clinton

The challenge is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.

# Milan Kundera

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

# Reinhold Messner

Climbing is more of an art than a sport. It’s the aesthetics of a mountain that compels me. The line of a route, the style of ascent. It is creative.

# James Altucher

Most people are not good people. In business, in art, in almost every ‘world’ I’ve been in, most people I’ve meet are pretty gray to black. It takes practice to be the person who is a source of compassion and honesty.

# Rudolf Steiner

Our task is to find teaching methods that continually engage the whole human being. We would not succeed in this endeavor if we failed to concentrate on developing the human sense of art.

# Edgar Degas

No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters.

Giorgio Vasari

Art owes its origin to Nature herself… this beautiful creation, the world, supplied the first model, while the original teacher was that divine intelligence which has not only made us superior to the other animals, but like God Himself, if I may venture to say it.

# Brian De Palma

So I like to try to go back and develop pure visual storytelling. Because to me, it’s one of the most exciting aspects of making movies and almost a lost art at this point.

# Barbara Hepworth

At no point do I wish to be in conflict with any man or masculine thought. It doesn’t enter my consciousness. Art is anonymous. It’s not competitive with men. It’s a complementary contribution.

# Walter Pater

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

# Willem de Kooning

I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.

# Marcus Aurelius

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

# Zoltan Kodaly

Real art is one of the most powerful forces in the rise of mankind, and he who renders it accessible to as many people as possible is a benefactor of humanity.

# Alexander Pope

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those move easiest who have learn’d to dance.

# Kenneth Clark

No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow – and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.

# Franklin P. Jones

Originality is the art of concealing your source.

# Daniel Caesar

Real power is being able to take care of yourself. My job is to make art, but I aspire to do more than that.

# Paul Klee

Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see.

# Henry Kissinger

Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.

# George Jean Nathan

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

# Damien Hirst

For me, art is always a kind of theater.

# Samuel Johnson

There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

# Lady Gaga

Every bit of me is devoted to love and art. And I aspire to try to be a teacher to my young fans who feel just like I felt when I was younger. I just felt like a freak. I guess what I’m trying to say is I’m trying to liberate them, I want to free them of their fears and make them feel that they can make their own space in the world.

# Charles de Lint

The beginning of a friendship, the fact that two people out of the thousands around them can meet and connect and become friends, seems like a kind of magic to me. But maintaining a friendship requires work. I don’t mean that as a bad thing. Good art requires work as well.

# Charlie Haden

We’re here to bring beauty to the world and make a difference in this planet. That’s what art forms are about.

# Paul Theroux

Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art.

# Norman McLaren

In any art movement, the art has to move into a new phase – a filmmaker has a desire to make a film that is not like a previous film.

# Craig Brown

Cleanliness is the scourge of art.

# Michael Morpurgo

Encouraging young people to believe in themselves and find their own voice whether it’s through writing, drama or art is so important in giving young people a sense of self-worth.

# Diane Paulus

Opera is the ultimate art form. It has singing and music and drama and dance and emotion and story.

# Ella Wheeler Wilcox

So many gods, so many creeds, so many paths that wind and wind while just the art of being kind is all the sad world needs.

# Marc Jacobs

There is a small world of people who are very interested in contemporary art and a slightly bigger world of people who look at contemporary art. But then there is a much larger world that doesn’t realise how influential art is on things that they actually look at.

# O. Henry

When one loves one’s Art no service seems too hard.

# Alan Moore

Life is a lot more interesting if you are interested in the people and the places around you. So, illuminate your little patch of ground, the people that you know, the things that you want to commemorate. Light them up with your art, with your music, with your writing, with whatever it is that you do.

# Chet Faker

You can’t rush an art form.

# James Turrell

All art is contemporary art because it had to be made when it was now.

# Oswald Mosley

There are periods in history when change is necessary, and other periods when it is better to keep everything for the time as it is. The art of life is to be in the rhythm of your age.

# Justin Vernon

I don’t want to get myself in trouble – and I don’t think I’m super important or anything – but I think it’s so funny that when you look at the business and the way that people make decisions in their lives, whether they’re in art or music or they’re in industry, they forget that being unique is the answer.

# Camille Paglia

The 1990s, after the reign of terror of academic vandalism, will be a decade of restoration: restoration of meaning, value, beauty, pleasure, and emotion to art and restoration of art to its audience.

# Frank Gehry

An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art – or at least people call it that.

# Paul Cezanne

The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself.

# Brian Chesky

When you start a company, it’s more an art than a science because it’s totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that’s deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you’re an ordinary person and you’ve just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people.

# Tina Weymouth

Art is not predictable. Art is not golf, as great as that may be. There are 360 degrees of choice to make.

# Frank Ocean

In art, at a certain level, there is no ‘better than.’ It’s just about trying to operate for yourself on the most supreme level, artistically, that you can and hoping that people get it. Trusting that, just because of the way people are built and how interconnected we are, greatness will translate and symmetry will be recognised.

# Angie Thomas

Art is activism.

# Dante Alighieri

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.

# Charlton Heston

The trouble with movies as a business is that it’s an art, and the trouble with movies as art is that it’s a business.

# Robert M. Pirsig

The study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself. Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.

# Eriq La Salle

Art should offend people because art should challenge people.

# Reinhold Messner

Each mountain in the Dolomites is like a piece of art.

# Sandy Koufax

Pitching is the art of instilling fear.

# Swizz Beatz

There’s no wrong way of doing art. It’s an expression of the individual.

# Bozoma Saint John

For me, pop culture is very fluid: it’s music, it’s movies, it’s books, it’s art, it’s tech, it’s so many things – and as marketing and brand advocates, we should be able to to take products and services and match them to what’s happening in pop culture.

# Friedrich Engels

Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.

# Frank Ocean

Obviously, the cinematography of films is art, just as a still shot can be art. If I’m watching a Wes Anderson movie, the colour palettes alone, and the way they’re painted, could be art. With music, you’re a little bit limited, of course, because it’s only audio.

# Arsene Wenger

I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art.

# Claude Debussy

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

# D. H. Lawrence

I can’t bear art that you can walk round and admire. A book should be either a bandit or a rebel or a man in the crowd.

# Thomas Heatherwick

The world of contemporary art has, in a way, exponentially expanded in the last couple of decades, and almost every major city in Europe and Asia and North America has fallen over themselves to have their own contemporary art museum.

# Sushant Singh Rajput

I’m a trained engineer, so I’m conditioned to come up with a right answer to a difficult question, but when it comes to art, there is no definite answer because it’s so subjective.

# Richard Branson

The art of delegation is one of the key skills any entrepreneur must master.

# Marilyn Manson

I think art is the only thing that’s spiritual in the world. And I refuse to forced to believe in other people’s interpretations of God. I don’t think anybody should be. No one person can own the copyright to what God means.

# Madame de Stael

Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts.

# Takashi Murakami

Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended; and, in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of ‘high art.’

# Thomas Kinkade

Art is forever.

# Giles Deacon

My mother was a housewife. My father worked in the agriculture business, but they were very encouraging about everything. When I said I wanted to do art, they were very supportive.

# Noam Chomsky

Real popular culture is folk art – coalminers’ songs and so forth.

# Pratibha Patil

I believe economic growth should translate into the happiness and progress of all. Along with it, there should be development of art and culture, literature and education, science and technology. We have to see how to harness the many resources of India for achieving common good and for inclusive growth.

# Jonathan Jackson

I like movies, because it’s kind of a combination of every art, it’s like it’s picture, it’s story, it’s music, it’s kind of like a clash and a collide of every art. It’s really neat.

# Carmen Dell’Orefice

We’re all works of art in progress.

# Sonu Nigam

For me, learning is a continuous process and an all-inclusive one – reading a book, learning a musical instrument or learning the martial art called taekwondo. Teach myself something new – that’s my prayer.

# Octavia Spencer

You cannot live to please everyone else. You have to edify, educate and fulfill your own dreams and destiny, and hope that whatever your art is that you’re putting out there, if it’s received, great, I respect you for receiving it. If it’s not received, great, I respect you for not.

# Walter Hagen

It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.

# Fernando Botero

There’s nothing more superficial to do than to paint a beautiful woman. The most beautiful portraits in art were of ugly women. If you paint Brigitte Bardot, it’s a disaster. Sunsets, you have to stay away from sunsets. You paint a sunset, you are in great danger.

# John Burroughs

In winter, the stars seem to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of a more exalted simplicity. Summer is more wooing and seductive, more versatile and human, appeals to the affections and the sentiments, and fosters inquiry and the art impulse.

# Ingmar Bergman

Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.

# John Ruskin

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts – the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

# Abbas Kiarostami

A work of art doesn’t exist outside the perception of the audience.

# Austin O’Malley

Reason clears and plants the wilderness of the imagination to harvest the wheat of art.

# D. H. Lawrence

Design in art, is a recognition of the relation between various things, various elements in the creative flux. You can’t invent a design. You recognize it, in the fourth dimension. That is, with your blood and your bones, as well as with your eyes.

# Odilon Redon

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality… true art lies in a reality that is felt.

# Pauline Kael

Trash has given us an appetite for art.

# Anthony Hopkins

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

# Richard Holloway

Simplicity, clarity, singleness: These are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy as they are also the marks of great art. They seem to be the purpose of God for his whole creation.

# Camillo di Cavour

I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I tell them the truth and they never believe me.

# Claes Oldenburg

I am for the art of underwear and the art of taxicabs. I am for the art of ice cream cones dropped on concrete.

# Camille Paglia

Modern bodybuilding is ritual, religion, sport, art, and science, awash in Western chemistry and mathematics. Defying nature, it surpasses it.

# Shepard Fairey

The way I make art – the way a lot of people make art – is as an extension of language and communication, where references are incredibly important.

# Malcolm Mclaren

Art school had taught me it was far better to be a flamboyant failure than any kind of benign success.

# Rick Pitino

Technology is a compulsive and addictive way to live. Verbal communication cannot be lost because of a lack of skill. The ability to listen and learn is key to mastering the art of communication. If you don’t use your verbal skills and networking, it will disappear rapidly. Use technology wisely.

# Robert Motherwell

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

# Robert Kurson

More than reading – much more than reading, in fact – I developed a love for telling stories from listening to two parents who really knew how to do it. And it really is an art.

# Billy Sunday

There is nothing in the world of art like the songs mother used to sing.

# Robert Carlyle

My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.

# Larry Gagosian

Nobody really needs a painting. It’s something you kind of create value for in a way that you don’t with a company. It’s an act of collective faith what an object is worth. Maintaining that value system is part of what a dealer does, not just making a transaction but making sure that important art feels important.

# Molly Crabapple

Objectifying is kind of a funny thing. Art is objectification, all art, because you’re taking someone and making them into an object. But people can also talk back more to you when you’re sketching them. They can look at you and say, ‘Oh man, you got me wrong.’

# Jamila Woods

I really liked ‘Blk Girl Art.’ It’s like a manifesto saying why I create, whether it’s poetry or music.

# Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion.

# Duke of Wellington

The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill.

# Adolf Loos

Does it follow that the house has nothing in common with art and is architecture not to be included in the arts? Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument. Everything else that fulfils a function is to be excluded from the domain of art.

# India de Beaufort

School was rough for me. I was a good student in middle school, but high school wasn’t so fun. I still pulled through, though! I excelled in art, fashion, history and English literature – anything creative. Math and science I struggled a bit more in.

# James Polshek

I’ve always seen architecture as a healing art, not just as a beautification art.

# Edward Elgar

I always said God was against art and I still believe it.

# Patti Smith

I come from a real working class background, and I didn’t know anyone sophisticated – except I saw Edie Sedgewick once at the Art Museum in Philly. She had these black leotards and little black pumps and this big ermine cape and all these white dogs and black sunglasses and black eyes. She was classy!

# Sol LeWitt

All of the significant art of today stems from Conceptual art. This includes the art of installation, political, feminist and socially directed art.

# Robert Smithson

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

# Tre Cool

Punk rock has become another viable art form. It always was. But now it’s like everyone’s doing it.

# Bertrand Russell

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

# Jeff Koons

I always like to believe that my work is about the expansion of the possibilities of the viewer. So if you have a sense of a heightened situation where there’s an excitement, a physical excitement and an intellectual stimulation, there’s just this sense of expansion. Because that’s where the art happens. Inside the viewer.

# Pawel Pawlikowski

Life is complicated, and art has the right to be complicated, too. I don’t like films that simplify.

# Ludwig van Beethoven

O, you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you, and I would have ended my life – it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

# Earl Wilson

Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you’re scared to death.

# Nawal El Saadawi

To be creative means to connect. It’s to abolish the gap between the body, the mind and the soul, between science and art, between fiction and nonfiction.

# Robert Henri

I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.

# Piet Mondrian

Just as pure abstract art is not dogmatic, neither is it decorative.

# Barry Jenkins

Filmmaking is a very privileged art form. It costs a lot of money to make these things.

# John Kenneth Galbraith

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

# Hunter S. Thompson

‘Crazy’ is a term of art; ‘Insane’ is a term of law. Remember that, and you will save yourself a lot of trouble.

# Anselm Kiefer

Art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.

# Bell hooks

Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things.

# Friedrich Nietzsche

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

# Pablo Picasso

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

# Pope Benedict XVI

All the great works of art, the cathedrals – the Gothic cathedrals and the splendid Baroque churches – are a luminous sign of God, and thus are truly a manifestation, an epiphany of God.

# Gianni Versace

Even Michelangelo got paid for doing the Sistine Chapel. To those artists who say they’re doing it for the love of art, I say: Get real.

# Steve Martin

I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you’re an idiot.

Amiri Baraka

Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is.

# Henry James

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance… and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.

# Julia Child

The art of bread making can become a consuming hobby, and no matter how often and how many kinds of bread one has made, there always seems to be something new to learn.

# David Mamet

Art and mass entertainment and propaganda, they can all be plotted on the same graph, but there is a difference.

# Maya Angelou

Find a beautiful piece of art. If you fall in love with Van Gogh or Matisse or John Oliver Killens, or if you fall love with the music of Coltrane, the music of Aretha Franklin, or the music of Chopin – find some beautiful art and admire it, and realize that that was created by human beings just like you, no more human, no less.

# Rudolf Arnheim

The arts, as a reflection of human existence at its highest, have always and spontaneously lived up to this demand of plenitude. No mature style of art in any culture has ever been simple.

# Karl Popper

Science may be described as the art of systematic over-simplification.

# Yayoi Kusama

My art originates from hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings.

# Martha Graham

The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.

# Sun Tzu

The art of war is of vital importance to the state. It is a matter of life and death, a road either to safety or to ruin. Hence it is a subject of inquiry which can on no account be neglected.

# Charles Schwab

On the personal side, family is really important to me. I have a big family – five kids and 12 grandkids – so keeping that going is wonderful. And I do a lot of philanthropy. I’m chairman of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

# Aldous Huxley

Perhaps it’s good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he’s happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?

# Jerry Saltz

To engage with art, we have to be willing to be wrong, venture outside our psychic comfort zones, suspend disbelief, and remember that art explores and alters consciousness simultaneously.

# Ella Wheeler Wilcox

No difficulty can discourage, no obstacle dismay, no trouble dishearten the man who has acquired the art of being alive. Difficulties are but dares of fate, obstacles but hurdles to try his skill, troubles but bitter tonics to give him strength; and he rises higher and looms greater after each encounter with adversity.

# Bruce Springsteen

I think that is what film and art and music do; they can work as a map of sorts for your feelings.

# Hans Hofmann

What goes on in abstract art is the proclaiming of aesthetic principles… It is in our own time that we have become aware of pure aesthetic considerations. Art never can be imitation.

# Keith Haring

If commercialization is putting my art on a shirt so that a kid who can’t afford a $30,000 painting can buy one, then I’m all for it.

# St. Vincent

Fashion, for me, is anything that’s aesthetic and beautiful. Art, food, film. It’s something that I appreciate and really like.

# David Hockney

Shadows sometimes people don’t see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.

# Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Education is the art of making man ethical.

# Franz Liszt

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.

# Sherman Alexie

All I owe the world is my art.

# Sol LeWitt

A blind man can make art if what is in his mind can be passed to another mind in some tangible form.

# Alexander Meiklejohn

Democracy is the art of thinking independently together.

Casey Stengel

Ability is the art of getting credit for all the home runs somebody else hits.

# Hermann Hesse

Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.

# Prince

Art is about building a new foundation, not just laying something on top of what’s already there.

# Frank Lloyd Wright

Space is the breath of art.

# Charles Jencks

I do believe architecture, and all art, should be content-driven. It should have something to say beyond the sensational.

# Eva Hesse

Art and life are inseparable.

# Yoko Ono

I thought art was a verb, rather than a noun.

# Darren Criss

As a composer and as a musician I’m a true believer – and this is not to be overly diplomatic – I’m a believer that there’s artistry in everything from a lawn gnome to a desk chair to a symphony to an Andy Warhol painting. There’s art in absolutely everything.

# Wole Soyinka

But theater, because of its nature, both text, images, multimedia effects, has a wider base of communication with an audience. That’s why I call it the most social of the various art forms.

# Luigi Pirandello

I would love to spend all my time writing to you; I’d love to share with you all that goes through my mind, all that weighs on my heart, all that gives air to my soul; phantoms of art, dreams that would be so beautiful if they could come true.

# Will Durant

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

# Willie Nelson

I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times.

# Carmen Cusack

We will always need to be reminded that we are human. Art gives us that.

# Martin Luther

Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.

# Benjamin Disraeli

A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.

# Umberto Eco

Translation is the art of failure.

# Henry Ward Beecher

To array a man’s will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.

# Kanye West

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I’m going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

# E. L. Doctorow

Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.

# Donald Knuth

People think that computer science is the art of geniuses but the actual reality is the opposite, just many people doing things that build on eachother, like a wall of mini stones.

# Virgil Abloh

Kanye’s the best. He really, really is. He’s cool. And why we’ve always gotten along is because we can just sit down and talk about art.

# Susan Sontag

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.

# Don Miguel Ruiz

Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have: the creation of our story.

# Del Close

The world is a slightly better place for having improvisation in it than it was before. There’s something about it that says something positive about the human spirit, that a bunch of people can get together and by following a few simple traffic rules can create art and can entertain an audience and can thrill and exalt each other.

# Christopher Voss

Negotiation is often described as the art of letting the other side have your way. You have to give the other side a chance to put stuff on the table voluntarily.

# Robert Hughes

The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.

# John Burroughs

Without the emotion of the beautiful, the sublime, the mysterious, there is no art, no religion, no literature.

# Ai Weiwei

I’m most embarrassed at my art shows, even though I don’t show it.

# Pablo Picasso

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

# Horatio Alger

Thus the castle of each feudal chieftain became a school of chivalry, into which any noble youth, whose parents were from poverty unable to educate him to the art of war, was readily received.

# John Trudell

When one lives in a society where people can no longer rely on the institutions to tell them the truth, the truth must come from culture and art.

# Charles Maurice de Talleyrand

The art of statesmanship is to foresee the inevitable and to expedite its occurrence.

# Hans-Ulrich Obrist

I founded a club, which is called the Brutally Early Club. It’s basically a breakfast salon for the 21st century where art meets science meets architecture meets literature.

# Miguel de Cervantes

Tell me thy company, and I’ll tell thee what thou art.

# Theodor W. Adorno

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

# Frank Stella

I don’t like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.

# M. Night Shyamalan

Anime is intended to have ambiguous features. That’s part of the art form.

# Ellen Key

The art of living demands that our interest in bringing forth flowers in our family life equal the interest we take in bringing them forth in our window gardens. So long as their home-life aesthetics have not become ethics, women need not expect husbands, children, or servants to feel happy in the homes of their creation.

# Pat Conroy

The most powerful words in English are ‘Tell me a story,’ words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

# Julia Glass

A fine memoir is to a fine novel as a well-wrought blanket is to a fancifully embroidered patchwork quilt. The memoir, a logical creation, dissects and dignifies reality. Fiction, wholly extravagant, magnifies it and gives it moral shape. Fiction has no practical purpose. Fiction, after all, is art.

# James Turrell

There’s traditionally been a large disconnection in contemporary art between the audience and the artist. Generally, audiences are looking towards what they like, and I can tell you, that’s the last thing on an artist’s mind.

# Henry IV of England

The greatest art of a politician is to render vice serviceable to the cause of virtue.

# Steven Pinker

The art of photography is all about directing the attention of the viewer.

# Steve Lacy

I think it is in collaboration that the nature of art is revealed.

# Mikhail Baryshnikov

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.

# Martin Amis

Only in art will the lion lie down with the lamb, and the rose grow without the thorn.

# David Mamet

Movies were never an art form, they were entertainment. It just evolved into an art form from there, and it’s still evolving in different ways.

# Andre Gide

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

# Eric Hoffer

The best part of the art of living is to know how to grow old gracefully.

# Jerry Garcia

I listen to anything anyone gives me. I always go back to a few basic favorites. I can always listen to Django Reinhardt and hear something I haven’t heard before. I like to listen to Art Tatum and Coltrane and Charlie Parker. Those are guys who never seem to run out of ideas.

# William Hazlitt

Life is the art of being well deceived; and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.

# Sarah Kay

Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn’t just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person.

# Ann Landers

All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest – never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principles of equal partnership.

# Paul Mellon

Just as there is no substitute for original works of art, there is no substitute for the world of direct sensual experience.

# Maurizio Cattelan

Every work of art is a great promise of escape and, therefore, like an open invitation.

# Ava DuVernay

All the traditional models for doing things are collapsing; from music to publishing to film, and it’s a wide open door for people who are creative to do what they need to do without having institutions block their art.

# Jean Anouilh

Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It’s the aim of art to give it some.

# Rudolf Steiner

The history of our spiritual life is a continuing search for the unity between ourselves and the world. Religion, art, and science follow, one and all, this aim.

# Federico Garcia Lorca

Besides black art, there is only automation and mechanization.

# Ralph Bakshi

Cartooning at its best is a fine art. I’m a cartoonist who works in the medium of animation, which also allows me to paint my cartoons.

# Alexander Pope

All nature is but art unknown to thee.

# Washington Allston

Never judge a work of art by its defects.

# Alberto Giacometti

When you look at art made by other people, you see what you need to see in it.

# Kenny Scharf

Part of what I do and what I want to do is I want to bring art into the everyday life. If you can take ordinary just walking in the street and you’re confronted by something, that might change your day – it might inspire you.

# Rachael Leigh Cook

They’re not poodles, they’re art.

# E. T. Bell

Guided only by their feeling for symmetry, simplicity, and generality, and an indefinable sense of the fitness of things, creative mathematicians now, as in the past, are inspired by the art of mathematics rather than by any prospect of ultimate usefulness.

# Maya Lin

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.

# Glenn Ligon

Art points to things. It’s a way of giving people not the standard way of looking at the world.

# Robert Fortune

Nature generally struggles against this treatment for a while, until her powers seem in a great measure exhausted, when she quietly yields to the power of the art.

# William Cullen Bryant

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

# John Burroughs

The art of the bird is to conceal its nest both as to position and as to material, but now and then it is betrayed into weaving into its structure showy and bizarre bits of this or that, which give its secret away and which seem to violate all the traditions of its kind.

# Paddy Chayefsky

Artists don’t talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it’s stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.

# Lewis Mumford

The chief function of the city is to convert power into form, energy into culture, dead matter into the living symbols of art, biological reproduction into social creativity.

# Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

In seeking wisdom thou art wise; in imagining that thou hast attained it – thou art a fool.

# Juan Gabriel

Art is feminine… Look, if you’re handsome and young and beautiful, well, people are always going to say that you’re gay.

# Ben Jonson

Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.

# Kapil Dev

Fast bowling is an art, like spin bowling.

# Michael Leunig

In contemporary art culture, where good looks and clever strategic planning of art careers have become a feature, professional practice may be taught in art schools like a branch of public relations or political science.

# Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The problem of architecture has always been the same throughout time. Its authentic quality is reached through its proportions, and the proportions cost nothing. In fact, most of them are proportions among things, not the things themselves. Art is almost always a question of proportions.

# Spike Lee

My grandmother lived to be 100 years old. Her grandmother was a slave, yet she was a college graduate in the Spellman class of 1917. She taught art for 50 years and she saved her Social Security checks for her children’s education.

# E. M. Forster

History develops, art stands still.

# Cy Twombly

I look at a lot of artists. I’m inspired by – I suppose I shouldn’t say ‘inspired,’ but it’s not really influenced. I am inspired. Art comes from art.

# Emmet Fox

The art of life is to live in the present moment, and to make that moment as perfect as we can by the realization that we are the instruments and expression of God Himself.

# Donnie Yen

Martial art is a form of expression, an expression from your inner self to your hands and legs.

# Sylvester Stallone

Suddenly I’ve got an overwhelming desire to surround myself with the aura of classical and Romantic art.

# Steve Vai

I could never overstate the importance of a musician’s need to develop his or her ear. Actually, I believe that developing a good ‘inner ear’ – the art of being able to decipher musical components solely through listening – is the most important element in becoming a good musician.

# Jacqueline Bisset

I am a great lover of art, in many forms: paintings, objets, textiles. I don’t have the talent for painting, but I have a very good sense of colour, a love of visual beauty.

# Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.

# Zhang Yimou

To do art, one thing should always remember – subjects of people in misery have deep meanings.

# Fred Tomaselli

I like the idea of multidisciplinary conversations, so in that spirit, I try and make a contribution from the art world into the music world.

# Liz Phair

I try to see interviewing as performance art, and just take it as it comes.

# Christopher Lasch

Make it new is the message not just of modern art but of modern consumerism, of which modern art is largely a mirror image.

# A. Bartlett Giamatti

Teachers believe they have a gift for giving; it drives them with the same irrepressible drive that drives others to create a work of art or a market or a building.

# David Hockney

People criticized me for my photography. They said it’s not art.

# Song Contest. Sigrid

Most of the songs I write are full of power, and I’m suspecting it may come from my love for grotesque Renaissance art and the Eurovision

# Sufe Bradshaw

I’ve always been a creative person since I was young. I enjoyed art, museums, plays, but it wasn’t until I was about 10 that my mother encouraged me to choose a career, and it was acting.

# Pranab Mukherjee

India is a land of plenty inhibited by poverty; India has an enthralling, uplifting civilization that sparkles not only in our magnificent art, but also in the enormous creativity and humanity of our daily life in city and village.

# Michael Leunig

There are times when the art world seems like a religious empire. There are great cathedral galleries and pilgrimage sites where treasured art pieces are displayed like holy relics, and this can certainly be a great pleasure on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

# James Frey

There are no categories in contemporary art. There are no rules. Artists are given the freedom to make and create whatever they please and call it whatever they please. I identify with that system, or lack of system, much more than I do the landscape of contemporary publishing.

# Grant Achatz

Food can be expressive and therefore food can be art.

# Martin Filler

Masterpieces of art possess immense potential to advance a worldview that could help assuage the societal terrors posed by globalization, the most thoroughgoing socioeconomic upheaval since the Industrial Revolution, which has set off a pandemic of retrogressive nationalism, regional separatism, and religious extremism.

# Clarence Day

There is an art of reading, as well as an art of thinking, and an art of writing.

# Karyn Kusama

Making movies, even though it’s a business, is also an art, and sometimes you don’t hit the bull’s-eye.

# Rico Nasty

Once I found art, it was a wrap.