Art Sayings and Quotes

Best art sayings of all time:

The object of art is to give life a shape.
~Jean Anouilh

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

It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and i know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of it’s process.
~Henry James

Art has an enemy called ignorance.
~Ben Johnson

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

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.
~Louis Kronenberger

Art is the objectification of feeling.
~Suzanne K. Langer

Art is long, life short, judgement difficult, opportunity transient.
~Johann von Goethe

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.
~Jean-Luc Godard

Art consists of limitations. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
~G. K. Chesterton

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
~Sir Winston Churchill

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

Art is science made clear.
~Jean Cocteau

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.
~Guy Debord

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure – if you don’t like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don’t like it, you don’t understand and you ought t find out.
~John Drummond

Art is the most passionate orgy within man’s grasp.
~Jean Dubuffet

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.
~T.S. Eliot

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is the path of the creator to his work.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.
~Carrie Fisher

In art as in love, instinct is enough.
~Anatole France

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art tings 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.
~Marilyn French

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same.
~Gunther Grass

Art is a reality, not a definition, inasmuch as it is approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition. It is imperfect and untrue.
~Benjamin Haydon

If it were not for intellectual snobs who pay – in solid cash – the tribute which owes to culture, the arts would perish with their starving practitioners. Let us thank heaven for hypocrisy.
~Aldous Huxley

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.
~Aldous Huxley

Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by finess.
~Percy Wyndham Lewis

Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mothers face, her aspect and her attitude.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

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

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

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art: it is the part the schools cannot recognize.
~Pauline Kael

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

Art, that great undogmatic church.
~Ellen Key

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
~Paul Kleen

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning in memorable form – or else it is not art.
~Jacques Barzun

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

I wonder whether art has a higher function than to make me feel, appreciate, and enjoy natural objects for their art value.
~Bernard Berenson

If artist and poets are unhappy, it is after all because happiness does not interest them.
~George Santayana

Interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art.
~Susan Sontag

The object of art is to give life a shape.
~Jean Anouilh

Art is I, science is we.
~Claude Bernard

All profoundly original art looks ugly at first.
~Clement Greenberg

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

Art is a delayed echo.
~George Santayana

A work of art is a corner of creation seen through a temperament.
~Emile Zola

Art gropes, it stalks like a hunter lost in the woods, listening to itself and to everything around it, unsure of itself.
~John W. Gardner

It is not in life but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.
~George Woodcock

Art is based on order. The world is full of sloppy bohemians and their work betrays them.
~Edward Weston

It’s not what you see that is art, art is the gap.
~Marcel Duchamp

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