Art Quotes

"Personality is everything in art and poetry"

"In art the best is good enough"

"Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive"

Victor Hugo, Author

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

Frank Lloyd Wright, Architect

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

Aristotle, Philosopher

"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"

Aristotle, Philosopher

"A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened"

Albert Camus, Philosopher

"A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest; Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem; and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art"

Benjamin Disraeli, Statesman

"Art is the elimination of the unnecessary"

Pablo Picasso, Artist

"What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose"

Willa Cather, Author

"All art is but imitation of nature"

Seneca the Younger, Statesman

"Originality is the art of concealing your source"

Franklin P. Jones, Journalist

"The counterfeit and counterpart of Nature is reproduced in art"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Poet

"Art lies by its own artifice"

Ovid, Poet

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it"

C. S. Lewis, Author

"Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century"

Marshall McLuhan, Sociologist

"All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent"

John Ruskin, Writer

"Death is an endless night so awful to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all joy and all art"

Paul Theroux, Novelist

"Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers"

Nathaniel Hawthorne, Novelist

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

Paul Valery, Poet

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

Walter Savage Landor, Poet

"We're going to shoot one Polaroid per show. I'm going to sign this before it even develops because I know that once it develops with my signature on it, it's worth a fortune. I'll make this a work of magic warlock art"

Charlie Sheen, Actor

"Art is never finished, only abandoned"

Leonardo da Vinci, Artist

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

Epicurus, Philosopher

"Yoga is an art and science of living"

Indra Devi, Celebrity

"The art of victory is learned in defeat"

Simon Bolivar, Leader

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

Maria Callas, Musician

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

David Seabury, Psychologist

"I would prefer to have a more appealing job. If I could still change careers, I would prefer it. This unfortunate art is made for long beards and ugly faces rather than for a relatively well-endowed woman"

Camille Claudel, Sculptor

"Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization; it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man's cruelty and baseness"

Bryant H. McGill, Author

"One of the interesting things here is that the people who should be shaping the future are politicians. But the political framework itself is so dead and closed that people look to other sources, like artists, because art and music allow people a certain freedom"

Thom Yorke, Musician

"I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character"

Maya Lin, Architect

"I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them"

Maya Lin, Architect

"I never had the exposure to techniques and so forth that children have today with art workshops, but I always had crayons and pencils and still have work going right back to when I was five or six years old"

Robert Indiana, Artist

"I can concentrate on my art"

Lou Reed, Musician

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

Gian Carlo Menotti, Composer

"Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It's the aim of art to give it some"

Jean Anouilh, Playwright

"Gloom and solemnity are entirely out of place in even the most rigorous study of an art originally intended to make glad the heart of man"

Ezra Pound, Poet

"Now, to describe the process of the Wrapped Reichstag, which went from 1971 to '95, there is an entire book about that, because each one of our projects has its own book. The book is not an art book, meaning it's not written by an art historian"

Christo, Artist

"When I travel, I draw and paint sketches which is great fun. And as long as you are fully aware that it has nothing to do with actual art, I think that's all right"

Arne Jacobsen, Architect

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