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Famous Art Quotes
“You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear thorough the search.”
- Rick Riordan
“You don't make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.”
- Ansel Adams
“A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.”
- Ansel Adams
“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”
-Twyla Tharp
“If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.”
-Yann Martel
“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”
- Scott Adams
“We have art in order not to die of the truth.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“Art is the proper task of life.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.”
- Diane Arbus
“Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing is a meditation.”
- Henri Cartier-Bresson
“Art without emotion its like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.”
- Laurie Halse Anderson
“Nature is a haunted house--but Art--is a house that tries to be haunted.”
- Emily Dickinson
“I don’t like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life.”
- Frank Stella
“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one”
- Stella Adler
“All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story; to vomit the anguish up.”
- James Baldwin
“Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.”
- Cesar A. Cruz
“Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.”
- Banksy
"Painting something that defies the law of the land is good. Painting something that defies the law of the land and the law of gravity at the same time is ideal."
- Banksy
“The paintings of Francis Bacon to my eye are very beautiful. The paintings of Bosch or Goya are to my eye very beautiful. I've also stood in front of those same paintings with people who've said, 'let's get on to the Botticelli’s as soon as possible.' I have lingered, of course.”
- Clive Barker
“Here’s to freedom, cheers to art. Here’s to having an excellent adventure and may the stopping never start.”
- Jason Mraz
“Art is making something out of nothing, and selling it.”
- Frank Zappa
“Modern paintings are like women, you'll never enjoy them if you try to understand them.”
- Freddie Mercury
“In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn't creak.”
- Tom Robbins
“The Earth is Art, The Photographer is only a Witness ”
- Yann Arthus-Bertrand
“The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.”
- Anton Chekhov
“Art is a personal act of courage, something one human does that creates change in another.”
- Seth Godin
“Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artists metaphysical value judgments.”
- Ayn Rand
“In art as in love, instinct is enough. ”
- Anatole France
"Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all."
- Ray Bradbury
"Painting is the silence of thought and the music of sight."
- Orhan Pamuk
“If a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you."
- Donna Tartt
"Color is a power which directly influences the soul."
- Wassily Kandinsky (Vasiliy Kandinskiy)
“There is no must in art because art is free.”
- Wassily Kandinsky
“Any fool can paint a picture, but it takes a wise person to be able to sell it.”
- Samuel Butler
“Art is literacy of the heart.”
- Elliot Eisner
“As my artist’s statement explains, my work is utterly incomprehensible and is therefore full of deep significance”
- Calvin and Hobbes
“Art is either plagiarism or revolution.”
- Paul Gauguin
“Do not copy nature too much. Art is an abstraction.”
- Paul Gauguin
“Art = a mad search for individualism.”
- Paul Gauguin
“The object isn’t to make art, it’s to be in that wonderful state which makes art inevitable.”
- Robert Henri
“I am interested in art as a means of living a life; not as a means of making a living.”
- Robert Henri
“Color is a matter of taste and emotion.”
- Edouard Manet
“Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.”
- Jean-Luc Godard
“The artist is always beginning. Any work of art which is not a beginning, an invention, a discovery is of little worth.”
- Ezra Pound
“Artwork is completed when it has the shade of god in it.”
- Rembrandt van Rijn
“Art doesn’t have to be pretty. It has to be meaningful.”
- Duane Hanson
“Art is when you hear a knocking from your soul — and you answer.”
- Terri Guillemets
“Art reaches its greatest peak when devoid of self-consciousness. Freedom discovers man the moment he loses concern over what impression he is making or about to make.”
- Bruce Lee
”Creative work is not a selfish act or a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.”
- Steven Pressfield
“Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.”
- André Gide
“Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.”
- Magdalena Abakanowicz
“A piece of art is never a finished work. It answers a question which has been asked, and asks a new question.”
- Robert Engman
“Sex is like art. Most of it is pretty bad, and the good stuff is out of your price range.”
- Scott Roeben
“Personality is everything in art and poetry.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“My God! How long is art, how short is life.”
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“No artist is ahead of his time. He is his time, it’s just that others are behind the times.”
- Martha Graham
“I will be an artist or nothing!”
- Eugene O’Neill
“Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”
- G.K. Chesterton
"Paint what you like and die happy.”
- Henry Miller
"Paintings are seldom guilty and often framed for crimes they did not commit. Some cover holes-holes in walls, holes in lives. Some make holes-in wallets, holes in hearts...in negative space."
- Marilyn Manson
“According to my figures I've only had 2500 pieces of ass but I've watched 12500 horse races, and if I have any advice to anybody, it's this: take up watercolor painting."
- Charles Bukowski
“A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.”
- Albert Camus
“If all the world were clear, art would not exist.”
- Albert Camus
“Art does not retain, it foresees the upcoming events.”
- August Everding
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