Art Quotes

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.

Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power...Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.

Remember this practical piece of advice: Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet. Leave your dust and dirt outside. Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties with your outside clothing - all the things that ruin your life and draw your attention away from your art - at the door.

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

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

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. Art is born out of an ill-designed world.

To talk well and eloquently is a very great art, but that an equally great one is to know the right moment to stop.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking. Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings, and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another ruler with trumpetings again. Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong men are yet in the cradle. Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.

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.

...A strange art "“ music "“ the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

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

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

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

Life is your art. An open, aware heart is your camera. A oneness with your world is your film. Your bright eyes and easy smile is your museum.

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

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Here in Manto's own words that he wanted to mark his grave with: "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful Here lies Saadat Hasan Manto and with him lie buried all the secrets and mysteries of the art of short-story writing.... Under tons of earth he lies, still wondering who among the two is greater short-story writer: God or He.

When I know your soul, I will paint your eyes.

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

Education is the art of making man ethical.

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?

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.

Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry... no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

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

The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

The richer we have become materially, the poorer we become morally and spiritually. We have learned to fly in the air like birds and swim in the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers.

The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his information and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he's always doing both.

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

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

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

I would like to paint the way a bird sings.

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

Modern paintings are like women, you'll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life.

Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

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

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.

Talent is cheap; dedication is expensive. It will cost you your life.

You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescabably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

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

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

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

To create one's world in any of the arts takes courage.

Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of Men and deny equal privileges to others; the Constitution of the Republic should make a Special privilege for medical freedoms as well as religious freedom.

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.

Genius is personal, decided by fate, but it expresses itself by means of system. There is no work of art without system.

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies; frequent coffeehouses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle; reinvent. Build a tangled bank.

Be kind to dragons, for thou art crunchy when toasted and taste good with ketchup. (Sebastian)

I shut my eyes in order to see.

And as much as I’d like to believe there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.

Art and life are subjective. Not everybody's gonna dig what I dig, but I reserve the right to dig it.

My love is like a red, red rose That's newly sprung in June: My love is like the melody That's sweetly played in tune. How fair art thou, my bonnie lass, So deep in love am I; And I will love thee still, my dear, Till all the seas gang dry. Till all the seas gang dry, my dear, And the rocks melt with the sun; I will love thee still, my dear, While the sands of life shall run. And fare thee weel, my only love. And fare thee weel awhile! And I will come again, my love, Though it were ten thousand mile.

The life so brief, the art so long in the learning, the attempt so hard, the conquest so sharp, the fearful joy that ever slips away so quickly - by all this I mean love, which so sorely astounds my feeling with its wondrous operation, that when I think upon it I scarce know whether I wake or sleep.

Love isn't an emotion or an instinct - it's an art.

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is.

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

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

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

When art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.

Nature is the art of God.

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to compositions as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.

How many husbands have I had? You mean apart from my own?

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

A creative person has to create. It doesn't really matter what you create. If such a dancer wanted to go out and build the cactus gardens where he could, in Mexico, let him do that, but something that is creative has to go on.

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

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

Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter's or sculptor's work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God's spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts.

When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.

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

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.

I do not believe in God, yet I believe in Picasso.

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

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

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Faith is not an art. Faith is not an achievement. Faith is not a good work of which some may boast while others can excuse themselves with a shrug of the shoulders for not being capable of it. It is a decisive insight of faith itself that all of us are incapable of faith in ourselves, whether we think of its preparation, beginning, continuation, or completion. In this respect believers understand unbelievers, skeptics, and atheists better than they understand themselves. Unlike unbelievers, they regard the impossibility of faith as necessary, not accidental ...

Happiness is an angel with a serious face

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.

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

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

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.

To do a dull thing with style-now that's what I call art.

The truth of Zen, just a little bit of it, is what turns one's humdrum life, a life of monotonous, uninspiring commonplaceness, into one of art, full of genuine inner creativity.

My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece

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

Music is the silence between the notes.

In art as in lovemaking, heartfelt ineptitude has its appeal and so does heartless skill, but what you want is passionate virtuosity.

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art.

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.

Art is the funnel, as it were, through which spirit is poured into life.

I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you're an artist, by children if you're not.

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.

I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them.

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good…Art can only give food – a jolt – the occasion – for psychical experience.

The good qualities in our soul are most successfully and forcefully awakened by the power of art. Just as science is the intellect of the world, art is its soul."

Silence is one of the great arts of conversation.

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.

There art two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness.

Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.

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

Don't wait for inspiration. It comes while one is working.

is either plagiarism or revolution.

A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier. That is why Chippendale is famous.

Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet

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

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

I decided that if I could paint that flower in a huge scale, you could not ignore its beauty.

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

In almost every professional field, in business and in the arts and sciences, women are still treated as second-class citizens. It would be a great service to tell girls who plan to work in society to expect this subtle, uncomfortable discrimination-tell them not to be quiet, and hope it will go away, but fight it. A girl should not expect special privileges because of her sex, but neither should she "adjust" to prejudice and discrimination.

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

I think everything in life is art. What you do. How you dress. The way you love someone, and how you talk. Your smile and your personality. What you believe in, and all your dreams. The way you drink your tea. How you decorate your home. Or party. Your grocery list. The food you make. How your writing looks. And the way you feel. Life is art.

Art alone makes life possible "“ this is how radically I should like to formulate it. I would say that without art man is inconceivable in physiological terms"¦ I would say man does not consist only of chemical processes, but also of metaphysical occurrences. The provocateur of the chemical processes is located outside the world. Man is only truly alive when he realizes he is a creative, artistic being"¦ Even the act of peeling a potato can be a work of art if it is a conscious act.

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.

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

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.

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.

I can't change the fact that my paintings don't sell. But the time will come when people will recognize that they are worth more than the value of the paints used in the picture.

If Antarctica were music it would be Mozart. Art, and it would be Michelangelo. Literature, and it would be Shakespeare. And yet it is something even greater; the only place on earth that is still as it should be. May we never tame it.

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.

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

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.

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.

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

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.

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.

The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

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

Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.

To practice kata is not to memorize an order. Find the katas that work for you, understand them, digest them & stick with them for life.

God, of thy goodness, give me Thyself; for Thou art enough for me, and I can ask for nothing less that can be full honor to Thee. And if I ask anything that is less, ever Shall I be in want, for only in Thee have I all.

Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated.

I see love, like art, as an obsession. Maybe that's an overly romantic view of human existence, but I'm an overly romantic human being. If love, like rock and roll, doesn't consume me 24-7, it's not love. It can be respect, appreciation, admiration, wonderment, it can be a world of glory and a lifetime of peace, but I can't call it love. Love burns me and confuses me. Love's a light that can't be extinguished.

I adore art... when I am alone with my notes, my heart pounds and the tears stream from my eyes, and my emotion and my joys are too much to bear.

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.

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

Life is short, science is long; opportunity is elusive, experiment is dangerous, judgement is difficult.

Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.

Watch a French housewife as she makes her way slowly along the loaded stalls... searching for the peak of ripeness and flavor... What you are seeing is a true artist at work, patiently assembling all the materials of her craft, just as the painter squeezes oil colors onto his palette ready to create a masterpiece.

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

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at the picture for a second and think of it all your life.

Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that's easy. What's hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that's creativity.

Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

The end of art is peace.

Never try to convey your idea to the audience - it is a thankless and senseless task. Show them life, and they’ll find within themselves the means to assess and appreciate it.

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

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

Two forces are succesfully influencing the education of a cultivated man: art and science. Both are united in the book.

The contemplation of beauty, whether it be a uniquely tinted sunset, a radiant face, or a work of art, makes us glance back unwittingly at our personal past and juxtapose ourselves and our inner being with the utterly unattainable beauty revealed to us.

I cannot conceive any work of art as having a separate existence from life itself

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.

If Christ were born in Bethlehem a thousand times and not in thee thyself; then art thou lost eternally.

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

An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.

I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness which characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm. I think that art has something to do with an arrest of attention in the midst of distraction.

Scientific research and other studies have demonstrated that arts education can enhance American students' math and language skills and improve test scores which in turn increase chances of higher education and good jobs in the future.

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.'

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.

Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that's why it is so complicated.

Truth exists; only lies are invented.

Only the pure in heart can make a good soup.

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

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

Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

In both the art and the business worlds, the difference between the amateurs and the professionals is simple: The professionals know they're winging it. The amateurs pretend they're not.

Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.

Everything must justify its existence before the judgment seat of Reason, or give up existence.

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

A painting requires a little mystery, some vagueness, and some fantasy. When you always make your meaning perfectly plain you end up boring people

The art of reading is to skip judiciously.

I believe the target of anything in life should be to do it so well that it becomes an art. When you read some books they are fantastic, the writer touches something in you that you know you would not have brought out of yourself. He makes you discover something interesting in your life. If you are living like an animal, what is the point of living? What makes daily life interesting is that we try to transform it to something that is close to art.

Art is whether or not there is a scream in him wanting to get out in a special way.

Modesty: the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it.

Those who still think listening isn't an art should see if they can do it half as well.

One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.

Art has always been my salvation. And my gods are Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Mozart. I believe in them with all my heart. And when Mozart is playing in my room, I am in conjunction with something I can't explain "” I don't need to. I know that if there's a purpose for life, it was for me to hear Mozart. Or if I walk in the woods and I see an animal, the purpose of my life was to see that animal. I can recollect it, I can notice it. I'm here to take note of. And that is beyond my ego, beyond anything that belongs to me, an observer, an observer.

It is our art that has an opportunity to leave a footprint in the sand. They don't wrap fish in our work.

Drawing is still basically the same as it has been since prehistoric times. It brings together man and the world. It lives through magic.

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.

In art, religion, and politics the respect must be mutual, no matter how violent the disagreement.

Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology.

It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.

Thou art coming to a King, large petitions with thee bring, for His grace and power are such none can ever ask too much.

Bit by bit, putting it together... Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art. Every moment makes a contribution, Every little detail plays a part. Having just the vision's no solution, Everything depends on execution, Putting it together, that's what counts.

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

There is no art without intoxication. But I mean a mad intoxication! Let reason teeter! Delirium! The highest degree of delirium! Plunged in burning dementia! Art is the most enrapturing orgy within man's reach.. Art must make you laugh a little and make you a little afraid. Anything as long as it doesn't bore.

Space is the breath of art.

No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.

When you start working, everybody is in your studio- the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas- all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one, and you are left completely alone. Then, if you are lucky, even you leave.

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

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

The art of life is not controlling what happens to us, but using what happens to us

A drawing is simply a line going for a walk.

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

If I could prescribe a single rule for looking at a work of art it would be to enjoy it. If we're honest with ourselves, we have to admit we enjoy our tears just as much as we enjoy our laughter. The only moments of life that are a bore are when we don't care one way or another.

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

Disco deserved a better name, a beautiful name because it was a beautiful art form. It made the consumer beautiful. The consumer was the star.

Choose only one master - Nature.

All art is but dirtying the paper delicately.

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

I think imagination is at the heart of everything we do. Scientific discoveries couldn't have happened without imagination. Art, music, and literature couldn't exist without imagination. And so anything that strengthens imagination, and reading certainly does that, can help us for the rest of our lives.

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

Great art picks up where nature ends.

I don't need the money, dear. I work for art.

Man is unique not because he does science, and his is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.

The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews.

Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.

My work is a game, a very serious game.

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

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

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

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

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.

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

I speak only of myself since I do not wish to convince, I have no right to drag others into my river, I oblige no one to follow me and everybody practices his art in his own way." - Tristan Tzara "Dada Manifesto 1918

There are two kinds of truth; The truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The fist of these is science and the second is art.

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

Create like a god, command like a king, work like a slave.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

I can worship Nature, and that fulfills my need for miracles and beauty. Art gives a spiritual depth to existence — I can find worlds bigger and deeper than my own in music, paintings, and books. And from my friends and family I receive the highest benediction, emotional contact, and personal affirmation. I can bow before the works of Man, from buildings to babies, and that fulfills my need for wonder. I can believe in the sanctity of Life, and that becomes the Revealed Word, to live my life as I believe it should be, not as I'm told to by self-appointed guides.

One should never criticize his own work except in a fresh and hopeful mood. The self-criticism of a tired mind is suicide.

The role of art is to make a world which can be inhabited.

Art begins . . . when someone interprets, when someone sees the world through his own eyes. Art happens when what is seen becomes mixed with the inside of the person who is seeing it.

There is one art of which people should be masters - the art of reflection.

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

My contribution to the world is my ability to draw. I will draw as much as I can for as many people as I can for as long as I can.

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.

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best

I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me.

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.

Only Art is Eternal Wisdom; what is not Art soon perishes. Art is the unconscious love of all things. ‘Learning’ will cease and Reality will become known when it comes to pass that every human being is an Artist.

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.

I'm a sworn enemy of convention. I despise the conventional in anything, even the arts.

Art is a spiritual, immaterial respite from the hardships of life.

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It's what everything else isn't.

Why shouldn't we, so generally addicted to the gigantic, at last have some small works of art, some short poems, short pieces of music [...], some intimate, low-voiced, and delicate things in our mostly huge and roaring, glaring world?

The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change; happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up.

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

When I first became interested in photography, I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself.

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

Color possesses me. I don't have to pursue it. It will possess me always, I know it. That is the meaning of this happy hour: Color and I are one. I am a painter.

A picture is a poem without words.

To me, a painter, if not the most useful, is the least harmful member of our society.

So I said to myself-I'll paint what I see-what the flower is to me but I'll paint it big and they will be surprised into taking the time to look at it-I will make even busy New Yorkers take time to see what I see of flowers.

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

Beauty: the adjustment of all parts proportionately so that one cannot add or subtract or change without impairing the harmony of the whole.

Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it; I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Technical knowledge is not enough. One must transcend techniques so that the art becomes an artless art, growing out of the unconscious.

We won't have a society if we destroy the environment.

Artists can color the sky red because they know it's blue. Those of us who aren't artists must color things the way they really are or people might think we're stupid.

Why shouldn't art be pretty? There are enough unpleasant things in the world.

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.

If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.

In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.

Ignorance is not bliss - it is oblivion.

One has a nose. The nose scents and it chooses. An artist is simply a kind of pig snouting truffles.

don’t write out of what I know; I write out of what I wonder. I think most artists create art in order to explore, not to give the answers. Poetry and art are not about answers to me; they are about questions.

Art is long. Life is short. A picture can become for us a highway between a particular thing and a universal feeling.

The buttocks are the most aesthetically pleasing part of the body because they are non-functional. Although they conceal an essential orifice, these pointless globes are as near as the human form can ever come to abstract art.

Originality depends only on the character of the drawing and the vision peculiar to each artist.

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.

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

A man can be a hero if he is a scientist, or a soldier, or a drug addict, or a disc jockey, or a crummy mediocre politician. A man can be a hero because he suffers and despairs; or because he thinks logically and analytically; or because he is sensitive; or because he is cruel. Wealth establishes a man as a hero, and so does poverty. Virtually any circumstance in a man's life will make him a hero to some group of people and has a mythic rendering in the culture — in literature, art, theater, or the daily newspapers.

For me, the martial arts is a search for something inside. It's not just a physical discipline.

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.

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

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

The art of living lies not in eliminating but in growing with troubles.

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

Nature does not create works of art. It is we, and the faculty of interpretation peculiar to the human mind, that see art.

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.

The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can't fake it... try to fake three laughs in an hour - ha ha ha ha ha - they'll take you away, man. You can't.

Immodest and attractive is easy. Modest and repulsive is easy too. But modest and attractive is an art form.

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.

Art is not escape, but a way of finding order in chaos, a way of confronting life.

The art of life lies in taking pleasures as they pass, and the keenest pleasures are not intellectual, nor are they always moral.

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

The artist need not know very much; best of all let him work instinctively and paint as naturally as he breathes or walks.

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness; but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution. Employ it, and thou art wise; be wise and thou art happy.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression, whether they are paintings, sculptures, tragedies, or musical compositions.

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

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

It is useless to talk with those who do not understand one and troublesome to talk with those who criticize from a feeling of superiority. Especially one-sided persons are troublesome. Few are accomplished in many arts and most cling narrowly to their own opinion.

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

It has never been my object to record my dreams, just the determination to realize them.

I photograph the things that I do not wish to paint, the things which already have an existence.

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

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.

Drawings help people to work out intricate relationships between parts.

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

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

It doesn't make much difference how the paint is put on as long as something has been said. Technique is just a means of arriving at a statement.

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

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys; look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death.

Effort is only effort when it begins to hurt.

Art is whatever makes you proud to be human.

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

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

Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.

I owe it all to art books, chocolate and young men.

I want to overhear passionate arguments about what we are and what we are doing and what we ought to do. I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another. I want to believe there are geniuses scheming to astonish the rest of us, just for the pleasure of it.

True values entail suffering. That’s the way we think. All in all, we tend to view melancholia as more true. We prefer music and art to contain a touch of melancholia. So melancholia in itself is a value. Unhappy and unrequited love is more romantic than happy love. For we don’t think that’s completely real, do we?…Longing is true. It may be that there’s no truth at all to long for, but the longing itself is true. Just like pain is true. We feel it inside. It’s part of our reality.

The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, 'Is there a meaning to music?' My answer would be, 'Yes.' And 'Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?' My answer to that would be, 'No.'

The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

Art does not die because there is no more art. It dies because there is too much.

All who have meditated on the art of governing mankind have been convinced that the fate of empires depends on the education of youth.

There are no forms in nature. Nature is a vast, chaotic collection of shapes. You as an artist create configurations out of chaos. You make a formal statement where there was none to begin with. All art is a combination of an external event and an internal event… I make a photograph to give you the equivalent of what I felt. Equivalent is still the best word.

Keep your love of nature, for that is the true way to understand art more and more.

Art is anything you can get away with.

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

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

To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art.

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

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.

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.

Art is a sense of magic.

Architecture is a art when one consciously or unconsciously creates aesthetic emotion in the atmosphere and when this environment produces well being.

Only a great actor finds the difficulties of the actor's art infinite.

Art is about trying to find the good in people, and making the world a more compassionate place.

Art is art. Everything else is everything else.

Art is excitement which if we can't create ourselves, we can at least, through love of it, make available to others.

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

We look at the world and see what we have learned to believe is there. We have been conditioned to expect... but, as photographers, we must learn to relax our beliefs.

Painting from nature is not copying the object; it is realizing one's sensations.

I would make my job a work of art. I would like whatever it is that I'm doing - everyone's experience of me, everyone's interaction with me, everyone's discussion, conversation, relationship with me - [to be] an event within which they get to see who they are. I would make of my life a work of art.

My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement.

My fear of life is necessary to me, as is my illness. Without anxiety and illness, I am a ship without a rudder. My art is grounded in reflections over being different from others. My sufferings are part of my self and my art. They are indistinguishable from me, and their destruction would destroy my art. I want to keep those sufferings

Leadership appears to be the art of getting others to want to do something you are convinced should be done

I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art.

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.

The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.

Western art is built on the biographical passion of one artist for another.

No girl who is going to marry need bother to win a college degree; she just naturally becomes a "Master of Arts" and a "Doctor of Philosophy" after catering to an ordinary man for a few years.

I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.

To see far is one thing, going there is another.

Set me a task in which I can put something of my very self, and it is a task no longer; it is joy; it is art.

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.

Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself.

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.

All the sculptures of today, like those of the past, will end one day in pieces... So it is important to fashion ones work carefully in its smallest recess and charge every particle of matter with life.

As President, I will end once and for all the use of taxpayer funds to promote the National Endowment for the Arts and other programs that subsidize amoral and degrading activities.

Art and morality are, with certain provisos"¦one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception of individuals. Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

Whatever man may stand, whatever he may do, to whatever he may apply his hand - in agriculture, in commerce, and in industry, or his mind, in the world of art, and science - he is, in whatsoever it may be, constantly standing before the face of God. He is employed in the service of his God. He has strictly to obey his God. And above all, he has to aim at the glory of his God.

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

Real painters understand with a brush in their hand.

I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle . . . . In great art, this conflict is hidden, it is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is disturbing - not perfect.

If it sells, it's art.

Painting is a blind man's profession. He paints not what he sees, but what he feels, what he tells himself about what he has seen.

We already have so much abundance. We truly do. We need not search too far. It is within. The reason we fail to recognize this is because we haven't quite mastered the art of being. For abundance to prevail, we must have LOVE, gratitude, acceptance and compassion.

If you want to live an authentic, meaningful life, you need to master the art of disappointing and upsetting others, hurting feelings, and living with the reality that some people just won't like you. It may not be easy, but it's essential if you want your life to reflect your deepest desires, values, and needs.

I invent nothing, I rediscover.

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

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

When it is working, you completely go into another place, you're tapping into things that are totally universal, completely beyond your ego and your own self. That's what it's all about.

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.

Music is the best means we have of digesting time.

The art has to make it on its own, without explanations, and it’s the same for poetry. If the poem or the painting has to be explained, then it’s a failure in communication.

The education bestowed on Flora Poste by her parents had been expensive, athletic and prolonged; and when they died within a few weeks of one another during the annual epidemic of the influenza or Spanish Plague which occurred in her twentieth year, she was discovered to possess every art and grace save that of earning her own living.

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

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

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

When you come into the theatre, you have to be willing to say, 'We're all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world.' If you're not willing to say that, what you get is entertainment instead of art, and poor entertainment at that.

To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they

No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity.

The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

No art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.

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.

The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being.

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

To live lightheartedly but not recklessly; to be gay without being boisterous; to be courageous without being bold; to show trust and cheerful resignation without fatalism - this is the art of living.

Acting is a matter of giving away secrets.

Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling.

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

There is nothing new in art except talent.

One thing is certain: the arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge, and, most of all, guarantee a future free from boredom. They allow growth and even demand it in that time of life we call maturity but too often enter it with a childish faith that what we learned in youth is sustenance enough for the years when most men are mentally famished but won't admit itﾂ熔r when they are apt to curb their hunger with the sops of complacency, security, and the assurance of death.

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.

Our best teachers do more than impart facts and figures - they inspire and encourage students and instill a true desire to learn. That's a fine art in itself.

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

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

Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly...and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it.

Leonardo Da Vinci combined art and science and aesthetics and engineering, that kind of unity is needed once again.

O great creator of being grant us one more hour to perform our art and perfect our lives.

Literature is the question minus the answer.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause -it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Telling lies is a fault in a boy, an art in a lover, an accomplishment in a bachelor, and second-nature in a married man.

Gossip is the art of saying nothing in a way that leaves practically nothing unsaid.

I think of horror films as art, as films of confrontation. Films that make you confront aspects of your own life that are difficult to face. Just because you're making a horror film doesn't mean you can't make an artful film.

Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

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

Politics is the art of controlling your environment.

I never can pass by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York without thinking of it not as a gallery of living portraits but as a cemetery of tax-deductible wealth.

If you don't live it, it won't come out your horn.

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

Great art presupposes the alert mind of the educated listener

If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art. And that—in a way, although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we're starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves. That's not an entirely despicable role for us to play.

The mind which plunges into Surrealism, relives with burning excitement the best part of childhood.

Movies will end up being this esoteric art form, where only singular people will put films out in a small group of theaters.

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

To listen closely and reply well is the highest perfection we are able to attain in the art of conversation.

I think as an artist you have to reinvent yourself every day.

Cinema is still a very young art form with extraordinary techniques and very impressive special effects but sometimes it seems the soul has been taken out of things.

A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.

When the artist is alive in any person, whatever his kind of work may be, he becomes an inventive, searching, daring, self-expressive creature. He becomes interesting to other people. He disturbs, upsets, enlightens, and opens ways for better understanding. Where those who are not artists are trying to close the book, he opens it and shows there are still more pages possible.

Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.

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

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

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

A good artist should be isolated. If he isn't isolated, something is wrong.

Art is not ideology. It is completely impossible to explain art on the basis of the homological relation that it is supposed to maintain with the real of history. The aesthetic process decentres the specular relation with which ideology perpetuates its closed infinity. The aesthetic effect is certainly imaginary; but this imaginary is not the reflection of the real, since it is the real of this reflection.

Being an artist means ceasing to take seriously that very serious person we are when we are not an artist.

A creator needs only one enthusiast to justify him.

For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and central and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiation of what is.

The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself, carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion; it is the current which he puts forth which sweeps you along in his passion.

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

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

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

One must from time to time attempt things that are beyond one's capacity.

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind.

There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music.

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.

My words, my writing, my actions—these have never been for myself alone, either directly or indirectly. There is no such thing as an artist who creates art only for himself. That is masturbation.

The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from.

Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn't grow out of either of our species' two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.

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

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.

Travel is the art form available to Everyman. You sit in the coffee shop in a strange city and nobody knows who you are, or cares, and so you shed your checkered past and your motley credentials and you face the day unarmed ... And onward we go and some day in the distant future, we will stop and turn around in astonishment to see all the places we've been and the heroes we were.

A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty. And man needs spiritual expression and nourishing. It's why even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves. Man needs music, literature, and painting-all those oases of perfection that make up art-to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.

The art of love is largely the art of persistence.

When men can be made to hope, then they can be made to win.

Culture is the sum of all the forms of art, of love, and of thought, which, in the coarse or centuries, have enabled man to be less enslaved

We need art as much as we need good works. You need it like food. You need it for inspiration, to keep going on the days that you're low. We need each other in that way.

I'm extremely profane, unconsciously so, when I see something great for the first time; I don't know why, but beauty and profanity are related to me in the same way. It may be that I want to think of art in the vernacular, but I have no control over what comes out of my mouth when my eyes take in great beauty...it might just be the reason I avoid going to museums with elderly ladies.

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

I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes.

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.

Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquility, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, over-refinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.

The pragmatist knows that doubt is an art which hs to be acquired with difficulty.

For too long the world has failed to recognise that the Olympic Games and the Olympic Movement are about fine athletics and fine art.

You know, the way art history is taught, often there's nothing that tells you why the painting is great. The description of a lousy painting and the description of a great painting will very much sound the same.

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.

Art is an expression of joy and awe. It is not an attempt to share one's virtues and accomplishments with the audience, but an act of selfless spirit.

It is important to express oneself... provided the feelings are real and are taken from your own experience.

If you clean it up, get analytical, all the subtle joy and emotion you felt in the first place goes flying out the window.

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.

Minority art, vernacular art, is marginal art. Only on the margins does growth occur.

Caricature is rough truth.

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

Through our own creative experience we came to know that the real tradition in art is not housed only in museums and art galleries and in great works of art; it is innate in us and can be galvanized into activity by the power of creative endeavor in our own day, and in our own country, by our own creative individuals in the arts. We also came to realize that we in Canada cannot truly understand the great cultures of the past and of other peoples, until we ourselves commence our own creative life in the arts. Until we do so, we are looking at these from the outside.

Art and order, the relatives that refuse to relate.

You get people talking about being worried about their art, and dances... their culture being wiped out or taken over, and yet these same people are taking advantage of their people to use them as cheap labour.

Don't ever for a minute make the mistake of looking down your nose at westerns. They're art - the good ones, I mean. They deal in life and sudden death and primitive struggle, and with the basic emotions - love, hate, and anger - thrown in. We'll have westerns films as long as the cameras keep turning. The fascination that the Old West has will never die. And as long as people want to pay money to see me act, I'll keep on making westerns until the day I die.

Oh, if it be to choose and call thee mine, love, thou art every day my Valentine!

The only hope I had was when (in his youth)I saw one day a photograph of a sculpture by Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a German sculptor of expressionistic style. This was perhaps the only example, Lehmbruck, between my sixteenth to nineteenth years in which I saw a possibility for art to be principally of interest to innovate some things, instead of writing a very boring, naturalistic repetition of what is already done by nature.

Art is a kind of illness.

The art of politics consists in knowing precisely when it is necessary to hit an opponent slightly below the belt.

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters.

Music connects with the soul. I think it's the quickest art form to the soul.

Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go... And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it's all over.

Amidst all the attention given to the sciences as to how they can lead to the cure of all diseases and daily problems of mankind, I believe that the biggest breakthrough will be the realization that the arts, which are considered "useless," will be recognized as the whole reason why we ever try to live longer or live more prosperously. The arts are the science of enjoying life.

Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives...most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity...when we are involved in it, we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life.

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

Art is a wound turned into light.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony.

Art is not to throw light but to be light...

We do this for the art, not the adulation. I'd rather our music get liked and we get ignored. I don't want to be adored for anything other than the music.

Making art in America is about saving one's soul.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information. When I write an advertisement, I don’t want you to tell me that you find it ‘creative.’ I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product.

Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

For his heart was in his work, and the heart giveth grace unto every art.

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

But all art is sensual and poetry particularly so. It is directly, that is, of the senses, and since the senses do not exist without an object for their employment all art is necessarily objective. It doesn't declaim or explain, it presents.

One succeeds in obtaining an equivalent production at a lower price by improving the arts, trades and agriculture and by developing the physical and moral qualities of workers, farmers and craftsmen.

You have to take chances for peace, just as you must take chances in war. Some say that we were brought to the verge of war. Of course we were brought to the verge of war. The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art... If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost. We've had to look it square in the face... We walked to the brink and we looked it in the face. We took strong action.

The arts equally have distinct departments, and unless photography has its own possibilities of expression, separate from those of the other arts, it is merely a process, not an art.

Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath.

The whole Renaissance tradition is antipethic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cezanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this... ...Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away form the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.

Besides learning to see, there is another art to be learned - not to see what is not.

Artists are always good for conversation, so long as you want to talk about their art.

If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

Science, like art, is not a copy of nature but a re-creation of her.

There are two kinds of truth; the truth that lights the way and the truth that warms the heart. The first of these is science, and the second is art. Without art science would be as useless as a pair of high forceps in the hands of a plumber. Without science art would become a crude mess of folklore and emotional quackery.

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

Art, of course, is a way of thinking, a way of mining reality.

I dream a lot. I do more painting when I'm not painting. It's in the subconscious.

Art doesn't go to sleep in the bed made for it. It would sooner run away than say its own name: what it likes is to be incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what its own name is.

Beauty isn't what you see on TV or in magazine ads or even necessarily in art galleries. It's a lot deeper and a lot simpler than that. It's realizing the goodness of things, it's leaving the world a little better than it was before you got here. It's appreciating the inspiration of the world around you and trying to inspire others.

Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men.

Writing is a craft not an art.

If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as your shirt.

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife. Nature I loved and, next to Nature, Art: I warm'd both hands before the fire of life; It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

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

Please do not strain yourself, Miss Doyle. I won't have my girls going cross-eyed in the name of art.

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

A beautiful lady is an accident of nature. A beautiful old lady is a work of art.

Art is so often better at theology than theology is.

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

Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. (1804)

The goal of art was the vital expression of self.

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.

Well, I feel that we should always put a little art into what we do. It's better that way.

This is what it is the business of the artist to do. Art is theft, art is armed robbery, art is not pleasing your mother.

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

My art springs from my desire to have things in the world which would otherwise never be there.

Often Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.

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.

An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.

Ninety percent of the art of living consists of getting along with people you cannot stand.

Chess is all about getting the king into check, you see. It's about killing the father. I would say that chess has more to do with the art of murder than it does with the art of war.

The thing I am most aware of is my limits. And this is natural; for I never, or almost never, occupy the middle of my cage; my whole being surges toward the bars.

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

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.

Jazz is about the only form of art existing today in which there is freedom of the individual without the loss of group contact.

Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian - ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art.

Everyone thinks they can write a play; you just write down what happened to you. But the art of it is drawing from all the moments of your life.

The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.

The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.

Strictly speaking, there are no holidays for art; art pursues you everywhere, and that's just fine with the artist.

Politeness is the art of choosing among your thoughts.

As yet, if a man has no feeling for art he is considered narrow-minded, but if he has no feeling for science this is considered quite normal. This is a fundamental weakness.

I couldn't portray a women in all her natural loveliness.. I haven't the skill. No one has. I must, therefore, create a new sort of beauty, the beauty that appears to me in terms of volume of line, of mass, of weight, and through that beauty interpret my subjective impression. Nature is mere a pretext for decorative composition, plus sentiment. It suggests emotion, and I translate that emotion into art. I want to express the absolute, not merely the factitious woman.

Reality only reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry.

What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

Waiting is one of the great arts.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.

I'm not saying that all college students are subhuman - I'm just saying that if you aim to spend a few years mastering the art of pomposity, these are places where you can be taught by undisputed experts.

Life is an art we are required to practice without preparation, a score that we play at sight even before we have mastered our instruments.

I know what I likeﾂ悠 like artﾂ預nd I like what I know.

The work of art is a stuffed crocodile.

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

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

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

He who is taught only by himself has a fool for a master.

It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.

Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.

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

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

Travel by canoe is not a necessity, and will nevermore be the most efficient way to get from one region to another, or even from one lake to another anywhere. A canoe trip has become simply a rite of oneness with certain terrain, a diversion off the field, an art performed not because it is a necessity but because there is value in the art itself.

If Botticelli were alive today he'd be working for Vogue.

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

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

You may choose your words like a connoisseur, And polish it up with art, But the word that sways, and stirs, and stays, Is the word that comes from the heart.

The building is a national tragedy - a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried.

Art is 'I'; science is 'we'.

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

If you don't get noticed, you don't have anything. You just have to be noticed, but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming or without tricks.

The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell; The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone.

The art and passion of reading well and deeply is waning, but [Jane] Austen still inspires people to become fanatical readers.

Life is short, the art long.

The big secret about Art is that no one wants it to be true.

Music is not written in red, white and blue. It is written in the heart's blood of the composer.

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.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

I believe in God, Mozart and Beethoven, and likewise their disciples and apostles; - I believe in the Holy Spirit and the truth of the one, indivisible Art; - I believe that this Art proceeds from God, and lives within the hearts of all illumined men; - I believe that he who once has bathed in the sublime delights of this high Art, is consecrate to Her for ever, and never can deny Her; - I believe that through Art all men are saved.

Science, like nothing else among the institutions of mankind, grows like a weed every year. Art is subject to arbitrary fashion, religion is inwardly focused and driven only to sustain itself, law shuttles between freeing us and enslaving us.

Art needs an operation

However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

Politics, when it is an art and a service, not an exploitation, is about acting for an ideal through realities.

We live through books; we have adventures in them, we lead alternative lives through them. We expand our memories through them. And that sometimes art can offer us more intense experiences of the world than life itself can.

The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.

My art, what do you want to say about it? Do you think you can explain the merits of a picture to those who do not see them? . . . I can find the best and clearest words to explain my meaning, and I have spoken to the most intelligent people about art, and they have not understood; but among people who understand, words are not necessary, you say humph, he, ha and everything has been said.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

Man loves everything that satisfies his comfort. He hates everything that wants to draw him out of his acquired and secured position and that disturbs him. Thus he loves the house and hates art.

Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him.

It is now life and not art that requires the willing suspension of disbelief.

O divine art of subtlety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible and hence we can hold the enemy's fate in our hands.

The man, the art, the work—it is all one.

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

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

Translation is the art of failure.

Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal; Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.

I regard it as a waste of time to think only of selling: one forgets one's art and exaggerates one's value.

Art has no other object than to set aside the symbols of practical utility, the generalities that are conventionally and socially accepted, everything in fact which masks reality from us, in order to set us face to face with reality itself.

For me, painting is a way to forget life. It is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.

It has bothered me all my life that I do not paint like everybody else.

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

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

Rules and models destroy genius and art.

The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead.

There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless.

Each body has its art...

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Beauty is the purgation of superfluities.

History, we can confidently assert, is useful in the sense that art and music, poetry and flowers, religion and philosophy are useful. Without it - as with these - life would be poorer and meaner; without it we should be denied some of those intellectual and moral experiences which give meaning and richness to life. Surely it is no accident that the study of history has been the solace of many of the noblest minds of every generation.

What art ought to do is tell stories which are moment-by-moment wonderful, which are true to human experience, and which in no way explain human experience.

And since geometry is the right foundation of all painting, I have decided to teach its rudiments and principles to all youngsters eager for art. . .

I tried to grow up. Honest. Didn’t quite happen. I guess I’m someone for whom youth still seems more real than the present, or the half century in between. And why not? I'm deeply underwhelmed by most contemporary art, literature, music, films, TV, the heinous little phones, money talk, real estate talk, all that stuff. The Internet, which at first seemed so fascinating, appears to be evolving into something even worse than TV, but we'll see.

Music is the art of thinking with sounds.

Art can contradict Science.

Art is made to disturb, science reassures.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

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

The short story is the art form that deals with the individual when there is no longer a society to absorb him, and when he is compelled to exist, as it were, by his own inner light.

It's only when movement becomes the most natural state in our lives that we can finally begin to enjoy the motion. And it's only when standing still becomes impossible that we can finally embrace the kinds of changes that are inevitable in our lives. We were not designed to stand still. If we were, we'd have at least three legs. We were designed to move. Our bodies are bodies that have walked across vast continents. Our bodies are bodies that have carried objects of art and war over great distances. We are no less mobile than our ancestors. We are athletes. We are warriors. We are human.

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

But in Christianity, by contrast, the freedom of the children of God was also freedom from all important worldly interests, from all art and science, etc.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.

If I'd been a housemaid I'd have been the best in Australia - I couldn't help it. It's got to be perfection for me.

When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.

The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.

Each of the Arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a Muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

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

A large part of my life revolves around my dad. Sometimes, I even feel a strong sense of connection, something very tangible when I learn something new in the martial arts.

Egotism: The art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.

The use of the term art medium is, to say the least, misleading, for it is the artist that creates a work of art not the medium. It is the artist in photography that gives form to content by a distillation of ideas, thought, experience, insight and understanding.

Photography has the capacity to provide images of man and his environment that are both works of art and moments in history.

To write with taste, in the highest sense, is to write [...] so that no one commits suicide, no one despairs; to write [...] so that people understand, sympathize, see the universality of pain, and feel strengthened, if not directly encouraged to live on. If there is good to be said, the writer should say it. If there is bad to be said, he should say it in a way that reflects the truth that, though we see the evil, we choose to continue among the living. The true artist [...] gets his sense of worth and honor from his conviction that art is powerful—

A photographer without a magazine behind him is like a farmer without fields.

The construction of Europe is an art. It is the art of the possible.

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

On the whole, age comes more gently to those who have some doorway into an abstract world-art, or philosophy, or learning-regions where the years are scarcely noticed and the young and old can meet in a pale truthful light.

Magic is the art of thinking, not strength or language.

Music and the arts feed our souls, but a decent wage puts food on the table. Musicians, fans of music, and grassroots political organizations are a potent force to fight for social justice.

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

Art is harmony. Harmony is the analogy of contrary and of similar elements of tone, of color and of line, conditioned by the dominate key, and under the influence of a particular light, in gay, calm, or sad combinations.

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

We all agree now - by 'we' I mean intelligent people under sixty - that a work of art is like a rose. A rose is not beautiful because it is like something else. Neither is a work of art. Roses and works of art are beautiful in themselves.

All sensitive people agree that there is a peculiar emotion provoked by works of art.

Perhaps catastrophe is the natural human environment, and even though we spend a good deal of energy trying to get away from it, we are programmed for survival amid catastrophe.

No poet will ever take the written word as a substitute for the spoken word; he knows that it is on the spoken word, and the spoken word only, that his art is founded.

Art is the triumph over chaos.

Rock isn't art, it's the way ordinary people talk.

Simplicity is not an objective in art, but one achieves simplicity despite one's self by entering into the real sense of things.

A great number of the disappointments and mishaps of the troubled world are the direct result of literature and the allied arts. It is our belief that no human being who devotes his life and energy to the manufacture of fantasies can be anything but fundamentally inadequate.

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

It is hard to find beauty in the art of self expression.

When I was your age, art was a lonely thing: no galleries, no collecting, no critics, no money. We didn't have mentors. We didn't have parents. We were alone. But it was a great time, because we had nothing to lose and a vision to gain.

As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.

You need more fact in the dangerous art of giving presents than in any other social action.

The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work.

The two World Wars came in part, like much modern literature and art, because men, whose nature is to tire of everything in turn... tired of common sense and civilization.

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination.

Originality is the art of concealing your sources.

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.

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

Conversation may be compared to a lyre with seven chords - philosophy, art, poetry, love, scandal, and the weather.

One writes to make a home for oneself, on paper, in time and in others' minds.

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.

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

It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.

We do not judge great art. It judges us.

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.

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

One of the drawbacks of Fame is that one can never escape from it.

The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.

The most profound things are inexpressible.

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

The maker of kitsch does not create inferior art, he is not an incompetent or a bungler, he cannot be evaluated by aesthetic standards; rather, he is ethically depraved, a criminal willing radical evil. And since it is radical evil that is manifest here, evil per se, forming the absolute negative pole of every value-system, kitsch will always be evil, not just kitsch in art, but kitsch in every value-system that is not an imitation system.

The faculty of art is to change events; the faculty of science is to foresee them. The phenomena with which we deal are controlled by art; they are predicted by science.

Painting is the art of hollowing a surface.

if the main reason we listen to music in the first place is to hear passion expressed- as i've believed all my life-then what good is this music going to prove to be? what does that say about us? what are we confirming in ourselves by doting on art that is emotionally neutral? and, simultaneously, what in ourselves might we be destroying or at least keeping down?

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.

I dislike literary jargon and never use it. Criticism has only one function and that is to help readers read and understand literature. It is not a science, it is an aid to art.

Rhetoric is the art of ruling the minds of men.

Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.

How rich art is, if one can only remember what one has seen, one is never empty of thoughts or truly lonely, never alone.

Art, if it can be ascribed value, is most valuable when its beauty (and the beauty of the truth it tells) bewilders, confounds, defies evil itself; it does so by making what has been unmade; it subverts the spirit of the age; it mends the heart by whispering mysteries the mind alone can’t fathom; it fulfills its highest calling when into all the clamor of Hell it tells the unbearable, beautiful, truth that Christ has died, Christ is risen, and Christ will come again. None of these songs and stories matter if the beauty they’re adding to isn’t the kind of beauty that redeems and reclaims.

Innocence of heart and violence of feeling are necessary in any kind of superior achievement: The arts cannot exist without them.

I'm a study of a man in chaos in search of frenzy.

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

Whether I get adequate attention or not, people here do know the work I have been doing systematically and without compromise for over 40 years. I get tired of people making excuses for guys who don't continue the art because they can't make a living.

All I want to do is make sure that art is available to all Americans in a participatory way, whether you engage in the art process yourself or you're an audience member.

All art involves conscious discipline. If one is going to paint, do sculpture, design a building or write a book, it will involve discipline in time and energy — or there would never be any production at all to be seen, felt or enjoyed by ourselves or others. To develop ‘Hidden Art’ will also, of course, take time and energy – and the balance of the use of time is a constant individual problem for all of us: what to do, and what to leave undone. One is always having to neglect one thing in order to give precedence to something else. The question is one of priorities

A discerning eye needs only a hint, and understatement leaves the imagination free to build its own elaborations.

I see, indeed I know, that in some sense God is love, and God is wisdom, and God is creative action, yes and God is beauty; but what God actually is, whether the maker of all things, or the fragrance of all things, or just a dream in our own hearts, I have not the art to know. Neither have you, I believe; nor any man, nor any spirit of our humble stature.

Where faith commences, science ends. Both these arts of the human mind must be strictly kept apart from each other. Faith has its origin in the poetic imagination; knowledge, on the other hand, originates in the reasoning intelligence of man. Science has to pluck the blessed fruits from the tree of knowledge, unconcerned whether these conquests trench upon the poetical imaginings of faith or not.

When you understand a species' art, you understand that species.

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

The art of an artist must be his own art. It is... always a continuous chain of little inventions, little technical discoveries of one's own, in one's relation to the tool, the material and the colors.

Art is the most frenzied orgy man is capable of.

The most beautiful things are those that madness prompts and reason writes.

I think there is no work of art which represents the spirit of a nation more surely than "Die Meister Singer" of Richard Wagner. Here is no plaything with local colour, but the raising to its highest power all that is best in the national consciousness of his country.

Any fool can have bad luck; the art consists in knowing how to exploit it.

Art has never been a popularity contest.

Decisiveness is often the art of timely cruelty.

All passes, Art alone Enduring stays to us; The Bust out-lasts the throne,— The coin, Tiberius.

The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.

Obscenity is a notable enhancer of life and is suppressed at grave peril to the arts.

Good humor isn't a trait of character, it is an art which requires practice.

Art is why I get up in the morning, but my definition ends there. You know, it doesn't seem fair that I'm living for something I can't even define, but there you are, right there, in the meantime.

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

Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.

Artists today think of everything they do as a work of art. It is important to forget about what you are doing - then a work of art may happen.

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

Art is the signature of civilizations.

All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man

The theatre is the best way of showing the gap between what is said and what is seen to be done, and that is why, ragged and gap-toothed as it is, it has still a far healthier potential than some poorer, abandoned arts.

Dancing is the loftiest, the most moving, the most beautiful of the arts, because it is no mere translation or abstraction from life; it is life itself.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

To live remains an art which everyone must learn, and which no one can teach.

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

The course of Nature is the art of God.

In the history of art there are periods when bread seems so beautiful that it nearly gets into museums.

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.

It is the mark of great art that its appeal is universal and eternal.

There are various art forms we may or may not have talent for, may or may not have time for, and we may or may not be able to express ourselves in, but we ought to consider this fact-that whether we choose to be an environment or not, we are. We produce an environment other people have to live in. We should be conscious of the fact that this environment which we produce by our very 'being' can affect the people who live with us or work with us.

Art is not necessary at all. All that is necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love - to love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved.

Discipline is simply the art of making the soldiers fear their officers more than the enemy.

The power of both myth and art is this magical ability to open doors, to make connections — not only between us and the natural world, but between us and the rest of humanity. Myths show us what we have in common with every other human being, no matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in. . .and at the same time, mythic stories and art celebrate our essential differences...

As one who loves literature, art, music and history, I've been deeply rooted in the Harlem Renaissance for many years.

Life is a mystery- mystery of beauty, bliss and divinity. Meditation is the art of unfolding that mystery.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

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

To be truthful, some writers stop you dead in your tracks by making you see your own work in the most unflattering light. Each of us will meet a different harbinger of personal failure, some innocent genius chosen by us for reasons having to do with what we see as our own inadequacies. The only remedy to this I have found is to read a writer whose work is entirely different from another, though not necessarily more like your own—a difference that will remind you of how many rooms there are in the house of art.

The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, culture. It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing art to defend their collapsing culture.

You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.

We are ending where the savages began. We have found again the lost arts of starving non-combatants, burning hovels, and leading away the vanquished into slavery. Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns."

[Camila] was quite incapable of establishing any harmony between the claims of her art, of her appetites, or her dreams, and of her crowded daily routine. Each of these was a world in itself.

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

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.

The art of writing is to explain the complications of the human soul with the simplicity that can be universally understood.

The art of meditation may be exercised at all hours, and in all places, and men of genius, in their walks, at table, and amidst assemblies, turning the eye of the the mind upwards, can form an artificial solitude; retired amidst a crowd, calm amidst distraction, and wise amidst folly.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which states seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of arts, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by means of war.

The New York playgoer is a child of nature, and he has an honest and wholesome regard of whatever is atrocious in art.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

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

It takes a long time for a man to look like his portrait.

I love awards, especially if I get them. It's up to the courage of the filmmakers to make art in cinema, not just business. John was rejected by studios, he borrowed money and did movies with his own money. You're either courageous or not. You have to find a way.

Art attests to what is inhuman in man.

A work of art is an act of love. Critics are crab lice.

The object of art is to give life shape.

Art and ideology often interact on each other; but the plain fact is that both spring from a common source. Both draw on human experience to explain mankind to itself; both attempt, in very different ways, to assemble coherence from seemingly unrelated phenomena; both stand guard for us against chaos.

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

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

Generally, the French highly promote culture and the arts, and photography is in their blood.

The drama may be called that part of theatrical art which lends itself most readily to intellectual discussion: what is left is theater.

Stealing things is a glorious occupations, particularly in the art world.

Grant that the true organ with which the beautiful is apprehended is the imagination, and it follows that all arts are likely to affect the feelings indirectly.

The scenery in the play was beautiful, but the actors got in front of it.

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

The whole art of life is knowing the right time to say things.

Paint the essential character of things.

What is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere - it is an art form in itself.

The only success worth one's powder was success in the line of one's idiosyncrasy... what was talent but the art of being completely whatever one happened to be?

Art is vice. You don't marry it legitimately, you rape it.

Movies are immortal art - the first new art since Greek drama.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

The message from the hedge-leaves, Heed it, whoso thou art; Under lowly eaves Lives the happy heart.

Logic is neither a science nor an art, but a dodge.

The artist takes in the world, but instead of being oppressed by it, he reworks it in his own personality and recreates it in the work of art.

Isadore [Duncan], who had an un-American genius for art, for organizing love, maternity, politics and pedagogy on a great personal scale, had also an un-American genius for grandeur.

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction.

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

The art music of the West has developed through out its history by means of individual geniuses, and out of the soil supporting them; non-Western musicians were born, and grew like the grasses of the field.

When I was an art student in the early 60's before the acid scene began I was smoking pot just like anyone else who was an artist.

For ages past the Genius of Literature and the Genius of Art have walked together hand in hand. For the Goddess of letters is blind, and only she of Art can lend her sight.

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

In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way.

Mass consumption, advertising, and mass art are a corporate Frankenstein; while they reinforce the system, they also undermine it.

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Interfacing street sculpture in public space creates an installation environment that turns regular space into art space. Signs and people and everything around a street sculpture-they all become part of it. A two-dimensional work, being confined to surfaces, doesn't have as much of a capacity.

The art of music is so deep and profound that to approach it very seriously only is not enough. One must approach music with a serious rigor and, at the same time, with a great, affectionate joy.

Whether I'm painting or not, I have this overweening interest in humanity. Even if I'm not working, I'm still analyzing people.

Some artists claim praise is irrelevant in measuring the success of art, but I think it's quite relevant. Besides, it makes me feel great

Hollywood was born schizophrenic. For 75 years it has been both a town and a state of mind, an industry and an art form.

The pleasure we feel in criticizing robs us from being moved by very beautiful things.

It is worthwhile adding that the power of the poem to teach not only sensibilities and the subtle movements of the spirit but knowledge, real lasting felt knowledge, is going mostly unnoticed among our scholars. The body of knowledge locked into and releasable from poetry can replace practically any university in the Republic. First things first, then: the primal importance of a poem is what it can add to the individual mind.Poetry is the voice of a poet at its birth, and the voice of a people in its ultimate fulfillment as a successful and useful work of art.

If it is the mark of the artist to love art before everything, to renounce everything for its sake, to think all the sweet human things of life well lost if only he may attain something, do some good, great work - then I was never an artist.

Nature is not only all that is visible to the eye... it also includes the inner pictures of the soul.

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

Originality is the art of concealing your source.

Diplomacy is the art of letting the other party have things your way.

In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

The American dream has always depended on the dialogue between the present and the past. In our architecture, as in all our other arts-indeed, as in our political and social culture as a whole-ours has been a struggle to formulate and sustain a usable past.

Whoever you pretend to be, you must face yourself eventually.

We who are in the arts are at the risk of being in a popularity contest rather than a profession. If that fact causes you despair . . . pick another profession. Your desire to communicate must be bigger than your relationship with the chaotic and unfair realities . . . We have to create our own standards of discipline.

Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down.

There is one thing one has to have either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge....

"The "art of tea" is a spiritual force for us to share."

Democracy is the art of thinking independently together.

Art in relation to life is nothing more than a glove turned inside out. It seems to have the same shapes and contours, but it can never be used for the same purpose. Art teaches nothing about life, just as life teaches us nothing about art.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.

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.

The art of using deceit and cunning grow continually weaker and less effective to the user.

To catch a husband is an art; to hold him is a job.

Thou art blind to the danger of marrying a woman who feels and acts out the principle of equal rights.

Art and relligion are not professions: they are not occupations for which men can be paid. The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not product to live - they live to produce.

Creativity is essentially a lonely art. An even lonelier struggle. To some a blessing. To others a curse. It is in reality the ability to reach inside yourself and drag forth from your very soul an idea.

A great work of art is one that continues to repay attention.

It's easier and sociabler to talk technique than it is to make art.

The camera can photograph thought. It's better than a paragraph of sweet polemic.

A great work is made out of a combination of obedience and liberty.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Now I really make the little idea from clay, and I hold it in my hand. I can turn it, look at it from underneath, see it from one view, hold it against the sky, imagine it any size I like, and really be in control almost like God creating something.

The bad teacher imposes his ideas and his methods on his pupils, and such originality as they may have is lost in the second-rate art of imitation.

You collect art: you must know that the miniature artists, at the end of careers spent painting the tiniest, most exacting details that no one would ever look at, would often put their eyes out with needles. Too much beauty, yes, but also too much seeing. They were tired of seeing. The dark was safe and warm and comfortable. Blindness was a gift. I still have seeing to do.

I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.

Blessed be the inventor of photography! I set him above even the inventor of chloroform! It has given more positive pleasure to poor suffering humanity than anything else that has ''cast up'' in my time or is like to — this art by which even the ''poor'' can possess themselves of tolerable likenesses of their absent dear ones. And mustn't it be acting favorably on the morality of the country?

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

I didn't have any interest in traditional art.

When I was a boy, unconsciously, spontaneously I learned the art of telling ironic stories.

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

It's the duty of art to ask questions, not to provide answers. And if you want a clearer answer, I'll have to pass.

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

The popular distinction between 'constructive' and 'destructive' criticism is a sentimentality: the mind too weak to perceive in what respects the bad fails is not strong enough to appreciate in what the good succeeds. To be without discrimination is to be unable to praise. The critic who lets you know that he always looks for something to like in works he discusses is not telling you anything about the works or about art; he is saying 'see what a nice person I am.

One might say that where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion.

Absence is one of the most useful ingredients of family life, and to dose it rightly is an art like any other

A good many inconveniences attend playgoing in any large city, but the greatest of them is usually the play itself.

How I envy those clerks who go by to their offices in the morning! There's the day's work cut out for them; no question of mood and feeling; they have just to work at something, and when the evening comes, they have earned their wages, and they are free to rest and enjoy themselves. What an insane thing it is to make literature one's only means of support! When the most trivial accident may at any time prove fatal to one's power of work for weeks or months. No, that is the unpardonable sin! To make a trade of an art! I am rightly served for attempting such a brutal folly.

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 mist

An artist's career always begins tomorrow

Engineering is a predictive science, not a manipulative art.

To abstract is to draw out the essence of a matter. To abstract in art is to separate certain fundamentals from irrelevant material which surrounds them.

There is an art in silence, and there is an eloquence in it too.

Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation.

Art is life, plus caprice.

To insist on purity is to baptize instinct, to humanize art, and to deify personality.

I'm simply saying that our deepest thoughts, desires and preoccupations manifest themselves in art, whether we intend them to or not. That's what art is for; it's not cerebral, it's emotional.

Our time and attention is scarce. Art is not that important to us, no matter what we might like to believe... Our love of art is often quite temporary, dependent upon our moods, and our love of art is subservient to our demand for a positive self image. How we look at art should account for those imperfections and work around them. Keep in mind that books, like art museums, are not always geared to the desires of the reader. Maybe we think we are supposed to like tough books, but are we? Who says? Many writers (and art museums) produce for quite a small subsample of the... public.

We have truth in order not to die of art.

Really to believe in human nature while striving to know the thousand forces that warp it from its ideal development-to call for and expect much from men and women, and not to be disappointed and embittered if they fall short- to try to do good with people rather than to them- this is my religion on its human side. And if God exists, I think that he must be in the warm sun, in the kindly actions of the people we know and read of, in the beautiful things of art and nature, and in the closeness of friendships.

Writing is manual labor of the mind: a job, like laying pipe.

If thou art a master, be sometimes blind; if a servant, sometimes deaf.

Great artists treasure their time with a bitter and snarling miserliness.

Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.

Chess for me is not a game, but an art. Yes, and I take upon myself all those responsibilities which an art imposes on its adherents.

When looking at any significant work of art, remember that a more significant one probably has had to be sacrificed.

An art book is a museum without walls.

Logic is the art of going wrong with confidence.

Where thou art, that is home.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand.

A frequent change of role, and of the lighter sort - especially such as one does not like forcing one's self to use the very utmost of his ability in the performance of - is the training requisite for a mastery of the actor's art.

I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do.

She doesn't give you time for questions as she locks up your arms in hers. And you follow till your sense of direction completely disappears.

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need.

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

One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Art said he wanted to get more distance. I told him to hit it and run backward.

With curious art the brain, too finely wrought, Preys on herself, and is destroyed by thought.

Advertising, an art, is constantly besieged and compromised by logicians and technocrats, the scientists of our profession who wildly miss the main point about everything we do"側

Mine was the role of the oilcan in making the machinery clunk around.

Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and "˜the public's right to know'; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living.

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Statistics is the art of lying by means of figures.

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

The movie medium will eventually take its place as art because there is no other medium of interest to so many people.

It would be difficult, in this day and age, to fund art that made racial slurs.

In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters.

Suffering is the price of being alive, and it is music and singing and art that has helped me live through some of the most difficult things that have happened to me.

A poet is a bird of unearthly excellence, who escapes from his celestial realm arrives in this world warbling. If we do not cherish him, he spreads his wings and flies back into his homeland.

I don't play the lottery. I don't care what my horoscope says. I think most things about the world could be improved if people thought more about what they're doing. When someone gets upset with their computer, I tend to side with the computer. I think art is overrated, and bridges are underrated. In fact, I don't understand why bridges aren't art. It seems to me they're penalized for having a use. If I make a bridge that ends in midair, that's a sculpture. But put it between two landmasses and let it ferry two hundred thousand cars per day and it's infrastructure. That makes no sense.

Repetition is the death of art.

I used to envy kids who had an old-fashioned Grandpa. Not any more. I've got a new ambition. Now I just want to become a modern-type Grandpa myself-and really start living.

The great art of governing consists in not letting men grow old in their jobs.

No one's conception of art is going to be acceptable to everybody.

A fine artist is one who makes familiar things new and new things familiar.

Bleed me of art, and there won't be enough liquid left in me to spit! [Michelangelo Buonorotti]

No command of art, No toil, can help you hear; Earth's minstrelsy falls clear But on the listening heart.

Advertising is the art of making whole lies out of half truths.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

O Life! thou art a galling load, Along a rough, a weary road, To wretches such as I!

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

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people

I mean, art for art's sake is ridiculous. Art is for the sake of one's needs.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical, that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum.

What I love about new technology is that it really pushes the art. It really pushes it in a way that you can't imagine until you come up with the idea. It's idea-based. You can do anything.

Politics is the art of postponing decisions until they are no longer relevant.

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

Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods

The dream reveals the reality which conception lags behind. That is the horror of life-the terror of art.

The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing

To a true artist only that face is beautiful which, quite apart from its exterior, shines with the truth within the soul.

It is only too true that a lot of artists are mentally ill - it's a life which, to put it mildly, makes one an outsider. I'm all right when I completely immerse myself in work, but I'll always remain half crazy.

Literature was formerly an art and finance a trade; today it is the reverse

To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature

Art is a jealous mistress.

What was great about the 50s is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art.