Art Quotes

Art Quotes

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

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.
William Wordsworth

Pictures must not be too picturesque.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

Rules and models destroy genius and art.
William Hazlitt

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.
Alexander Pope

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Francis Bacon

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

That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind.
James Taylor

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

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

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

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

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.
Pablo Picasso

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

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

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

The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.
Paul Strand

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

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.
Paul Cezanne

The beginning is the most important part of the work.
Plato

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

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

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

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

The history of art is the history of revivals.
Samuel Butler

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.
Paul Gauguin

The mediator of the inexpressible is the work of art.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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

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

The most profound things are inexpressible.
Jenny Holzer

The negative is comparable to the composer's score and the print to its performance. Each performance differs in subtle ways.
Ansel Adams

The object of art is to give life a shape.
William Shakespeare

The perfection of art is to conceal art.
Marcus Fabius Quintilian

The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.
Jerzy Kosinski

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

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

The real art of conducting consists in transitions.
Gustav Mahler

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

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