Art Quotes

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.

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

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full, that thou mayest be filled with that whereof thou art empty.

When thou art above measure angry, bethink thee how momentary is man's life.

The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.

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

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

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

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

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

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.

Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.

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

All art is quite useless.

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

It is only an auctioneer who can equally and impartially admire all schools of art.

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

Be slow to fall into friendship; but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.

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

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

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

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

Technique! The very word is like a shriek of outraged Art. It is the idiot name given to effort by those who are too weak, too weary, or too dull to play the game. The mighty have no theory of technique.

I love putting the music together. It's like art.

I'll dabble here and there in different forms of the art, but the label has me locked down like a slave so, of course, I'll be doing albums during this time.

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.

Anything that had to do with art I been doing all my life. It was a gift. It's nothing I work real hard at doing.

The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen.

And I know I'm supposed to feel guilty for wanting people to buy my books... and books in general? Novels and poetry, they belong to the realm of art. How dirty of us to try to hawk art! But, after a decade of hand-wringing and apologies, I can't quite muster the guilt anymore.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

The theatre is a gross art, built in sweeps and over-emphasis. Compromise is its second name.

It's only a few nutcases who do art for themselves, like Van Gogh.

The only thing approaching art in a movie is the script.

The only thing they can't teach you at art school is art.

Fashion often starts off beautiful and becomes ugly, whereas art starts off ugly sometimes and becomes beautiful.

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

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

We have long possessed the art of war and the science of war, which have been evolved in the minutest detail.

Animation is tremendously resilient. Animation will recover, as art always recovers. There's always cycles of good art.

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.

I don't think anyone has a right to possess anything he doesn't love - art or anything else.

Art is something to be proud of. Art is no compromise.

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

The surrealists, and the modern movement in painting as a whole, seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities, in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists, reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

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

The art of motherhood involves much silent, unobtrusive self-denial, an hourly devotion which finds no detail too minute.

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.

What is art? Nature concentrated.

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

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

I always feel that art in general and acting in particular should make the audience a little uncomfortable, to slap them and wake them up.

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

The first mistake of art is to assume that it's serious.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

Smiles come naturally to me, but I started thinking of them as an art form at my command. I studied all the time. I looked at magazines, I'd practice in front of the mirror and I'd ask photographers about the best angles. I can now pull out a smile at will.

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

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

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

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

Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.

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

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

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.

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

Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.

The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.