ART QUOTES III

quotations about art

Art quote

We live in a world full of urgent problems: climate change, terrorism and poverty, to name but three. We won't resolve them with brawn; they are obstacles we can only overcome by using our brains--when we are thinking like artists and not behaving like animals.

WILL GOMPERTZ

Think Like an Artist: and Lead a More Creative, Productive Life


Our mistake has been to categorize things as art by considering certain phases of the process of creation. But logically this can make all man-made objects art. It is more useful to categorize art by what has become its social function. It functions as property.

JOHN BERGER

Selected Essays of John Berger

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Art as Magic is a forbidden and illegitimate pleasure, and ... what we are ashamed of wanting most are our wishful apprehensions. The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true. Apart, that is, from the artist.

ADAM PHILLIPS

On Balance

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Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

C. S. LEWIS

On Stories and Other Essays in Literature

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While our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

RAY BRADBURY

preface, Zen in the Art of Writing

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The way to art was not to think too clearly, not to plan things out, but to follow where your heart and emotions led.

PAUL PARK

A Princess of Roumania

Tags: Paul Park, emotion


Art is a little subversive, very subversive; it gets underneath the surface and reveals what is there; it is a Geiger counter for truth.

PAT B. ALLEN

Art Is a Spiritual Path

Tags: Pat B. Allen, truth


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

CHARLES HORTON COOLEY

Life and the Student

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Modernity is the transitory, fugitive, contingent, is but one half of art, of which the other half is the eternal and immutable.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

"La Modernite", La Peintre de la Vie Moderne

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I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

"Riding with Death: The Final Years", Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960-1988

Tags: life


Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.

HOWARD ZINN

"Artists of Resistance", The Historic Unfulfilled Promise

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One of the things pounded in to my head at the university level was that art is communication. So showing your art is not only good for your ego, but it's discovering you can be part of this conversation that has been going on as long as people have been painting in caves.

ROBERT LEMMING

"Art Is Communication: Artist turned teacher encourages conversation", Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette, March 11, 2016


Art is memory's mise-en-scene.

LUIS BARRAGÁN

The Architecture of Luis Barragán


Whether it is the beautiful that brings to our hearts the love of truth and justice, or whether it is truth that teaches us how to find the beautiful in nature and how to love it, in either case art does a noble work. It drags out the soul from its everyday shell, and brings it under the spell of its own mysterious and wonderful power, so that a memory of this experience stays with the people, sustains them in their daily labors, and refines their minds.

HELENA MODJESKA

"Women and the Stage", The World's Congress of Representative Women

Tags: Helena Modjeska, soul


Art lifts man from his personal life into the universal life.

LEO TOLSTOY

What Is Art?

Tags: Leo Tolstoy, life


Nothing helps an artist's career more than a little death and obscurity.

DAN SIMMONS

The Fall of Hyperion

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Take a quart of nature, boil it down to a pint, and the residue is art.

AUSTIN O'MALLEY

Keystones of Thought

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Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term "Art," I should call it "the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul." The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of "Artist".

EDGAR ALLAN POE

"Marginalia"

Tags: Edgar Allan Poe, soul


Art should have political, spiritual, and surprising elements. It should try to find new language of communicating in order to give awareness to the public. Then every society can use the layer it needs at the moment. If one is interested in the political, they can take that. If the next one needs spiritual, it can be found in the same work. So if you just did one level, for example only political, it's like an old newspaper, you read it today and tomorrow it's old news. The art dies. Art with this kind of complexity has many lives where many societies can take something different at different times. It can live for centuries, otherwise who cares?

MARINA ABRAMOVIC

"Marina Abramovic Makes Sundance Shut Up", Interview Magazine

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Never judge a work of art by its defects.

WASHINGTON ALLSTON

attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern

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