Art
- After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest scientists are always artists as well.--Albert Einstein (in the Durban Morning Herald, 8/21/55)
- The aim of art is not to represent the outward appearance of things, but their inner significance.--Aristotle
- All great art ... creates in the beholder not self-satisfaction but wonder and awe. Its great liberation is to lift us out of ourselves.--Dorothy Thompson ("The Twelve-foot Ceiling" The Courage to be Happy)
- All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.--M. C. Richards
- Any form of art is a form of power, it has impact, it can affect change--it can not only move us, it makes us move.--Ossie Davis (Noble, Beautiful, Also, Are the Souls of My Black Sisters)
- Art advances between two chasms, which are frivolity and propaganda. On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lies the freedom of art.--Albert Camus ("Create Dangerously" Resistance, Rebellion, and Death)
- Art affirms all that is best in man — hope, faith, love, beauty, prayer…What he dreams of and what he hopes for. What is art? Like a declaration of love: the consciousness of our dependence on each other. A confession. An unconscious act that none the less reflects the true meaning of life—love and sacrifice.--Andrei Tarkovsk
- Art comes after an incredible load of work and only one thing will see you through that work--passion.--Don Hahn (Dancing Corn Dogs in the Night: Reawakening Your creative Spirit)
- Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.--Walter Pater (Studies in the History of the Renaissance)
- Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.--Thomas Merton
- Art is a little subversive, very subversive; it gets underneath the surface and reveals what is there; it is a Geiger counter for truth.--Pat B. Allen (Art Is a Spiritual Path)
- Art is not for the cultivated taste. It is to cultivate a taste.--Nikki Giovanni
- Art is the proper task of life.--Friedrich Nietzsche
- Art is the signature of civilizations.--Beverly Sills (Interview, 1985)
- Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.--Pablo Picasso
- The artist always has been and still is a being somewhat apart from the rest of humanity.--Beatrice Hinkle
- An artist must either give up art or develop.--Pauline Kael
- [The artist] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation--and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear…which binds together all humanity--the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.--Joseph Conrad
- Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.--Scott Adams
- The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world.--G. K. Chesterton ("On Maltreating Words," Generally Speaking)
- Each of us is an artist of our days; the greater our integrity and awareness, the more original and creative our time will become.--John O'Donohue
- Ever since the first shaggy hunter outlined a running deer with a stick dipped in wood ash or puddle clay or blood, paint has served a vastly more significant and creative purpose--as a vehicle for the human imagination, a creator of illusions, the modest but endlessly pliable means of fixing a glimpse of loveliness for posterity. The true originators in this field have always been the great artists. But close behind these masters of illusion came the masters of the applied arts--designers, architects, decorators, legions of craftsmen whose vocation was to reflect contemporary standards of beauty and harmony.--Jocasta Innes
- Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.--Pablo Picasso
- Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.--Daniel Berenboim (International Herald Tribune, Jan. 20. 1989)
- 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 little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.--Aldous Huxley
- For art is order, but it is born out of the chaos of life.--May Sarton (May Sarton: Excerpts from a Life)
- Good architecture is like apiece of beautifully composed music crystallized as space that elevates our spirits beyond the limitation of time.--Tao Ho
- "How will I ever get into the Metropolitan Museum of Art?" the aspiring young artist asked a great teacher. "You can either take the Fifth Avenue bus to 81st Street," said the teacher, "or work hard, be inspired, wait 20 years, and have them come to you."--Leonard and Thelma Spinrad
- I believe the approach of the artist and the approach of the environmentalist are fairly close in that both are, to a rather impressive degree, concerned with the affirmation of life.--Ansel Adams
- I do not evolve, I am. In art there is neither past nor future. Art that is not in the present will never be.--Pablo Picasso (The Art)
- I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.--Madelein L'Engle (A Circle of Quiet)
- I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.--Michelangelo
- If a man ... can paint a landscape, and convey into souls and ochres all the enchantments of Spring or Autumn; it is certain that the secret cannot be kept; the first witness tells it to a second, and men go by fives and tens and fifties to his doors.--Ralph Waldo Emerson
- In the first grade, I already knew the pattern of my life. I didn't know the living of it, but I knew the line… From the first day in school until the day I graduated, everyone gave me one hundred plus in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go to the place where you got one hundred plus.--Louise Nevelson
- It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.--Loren Eiseley (The Night Country)
- 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.--Anais Nin
- Life is a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint on it you can.--Danny Kaye
- A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.--Abraham Maslow
- No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.--Ludwig van Beethoven
- Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.--Leonardo da Vinci (Treatise on Painting)
- Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend.--Ann Lamont (Bird by Bird)
- Remember the great adversity of art or anything else is a hurried life.--Robert James Waller (Puerto Vallarta Squeeze)
- There are three types of people who major in art: those so full of passion they find inspiration in a falling leaf; those who yearn to feel anything at the sight of a falling leaf; and those who cannot do math.--Jessica C. Bakule
- There’s no "correct path" to becoming a real artist. ... You’re an artist when you say you are. And you’re a good artist when you make somebody else experience or feel something deep or unexpected.--Amanda Palmer (The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help)
- The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.--Cyril Connolly (The Unquiet Grave)
- 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.--Julia Cameron
- 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.--Henri Matisse (Notes d'un Peintre)
- What if imagination and art are not frosting at all, but the fountainhead of human experience?--Rollo May (The Courage to Create)
- Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.--Albert Camus (Resistance, Rebellion, and Death)
- Yes, the highest things are beyond words. That is probably why all art aspires to the condition of wordlessness. When literature works on you, it does so in silence, in your dreams, in your wordless moments. Good words enter you and become moods, become the quiet fabric of your being. Like music, like painting, literature too wants to transcend its primary condition and become something higher. Art wants to move into silence, into the emotional and spiritual conditions of the world. Statues become melodies, melodies become yearnings, yearnings become actions.--Ben Okri
- You are born an artist or you are not. And you stay an artist, dear, even if your voice is less of a fireworks. The artist is always there.--Maria Callas
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