Art Quotes

"Art should offend people because art should challenge people"

Eriq La Salle, Actor

"Traditionally art is to create and not to revive. To revive: leave that to the historians, who are looking backward"

Josef Albers, Artist

"I owe much to mother. She had an expert's understanding, but also approached art emotionally"

David Rockefeller, Businessman

"True art tries not to attract attention in order to be noticed"

Jose Bergamin, Writer

"It's fun having songs about parties and gigolos, but I really wanted to use my music as a form of art. Art is supposed to spark conversation and make people think, and I wanted to do that with this song"

Nick Cannon, Musician

"To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination"

George Jean Nathan, Editor

"When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul"

Max Beerbohm, Actor

"There is no must in art because art is free"

Wassily Kandinsky, Artist

"All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music"

Walter Pater, Critic

"I hope we can keep doing it this way - making music and art that are pure products of our influences while not really having to let the whole celebrity side of it get in the way. Then maybe more virtual bands will come out and do the same thing"

Damon Albarn, Musician

"Indeed the three prophecies about the death of individual art are, in their different ways, those of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. I don't see any way of getting beyond those prophecies"

Harold Bloom, Critic

"Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see"

Josef Albers, Artist

"The downfall of the industry seems to actually be good for art. I think the industry will find their way once the focus shifts from its greed-based origins, downsizes, and begins to support creative visions that speak to our times and shifting ideals"

Saul Williams, Musician

"The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years"

David Rockefeller, Businessman

"These maxims and the art of interpreting them may be said to constitute the premisses of science but I prefer to call them our scientific beliefs. These premisses or beliefs are embodied in a tradition, the tradition of science"

Michael Polanyi, Scientist

"You've got to appreciate the things that come from the art of the Negro and from the heart of the man farthest down"

William Christopher Handy, Musician

"In a relationship, when does the art of compromise become compromising?"

Sarah Jessica Parker, Actress

"Alchemy is the art of far and near, and I think poetry is alchemy in that way. It's delightful to distort size, to see something that's tiny as though it were vast"

Robert Morgan, Soldier

"Envy is the art of counting the other fellow's blessings instead of your own"

Harold Coffin

"A good face they say, is a letter of recommendation. O Nature, Nature, why art thou so dishonest, as ever to send men with these false recommendations into the World!"

Henry Fielding, Novelist

"In the place where I was a child, there were no artists and there was no art, so I really didn't know what that meant. I think I thought it meant that I would be in a situation different than the one that I was in"

Jasper Johns, Artist

"People are surprised at how down-to-earth I am. I like to stay home on Friday nights and listen to 'The Art of Happiness' by the Dalai Lama"

Carmen Electra, Actress

"Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever"

Alfred de Vigny, Poet

"I refuse to confide and don't like it when people write about art"

Balthus, Artist

"If you respect the art and you have some talent about you, I'm on your team"

Anthony Anderson, Actor

"Dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of which it is made"

Ted Shawn, Dancer

"An interesting thing happened in 1989, right as I was graduating: the stock market crashed and really changed the landscape of the art world in New York. It made the kind of work I was doing interesting to galleries that wouldn't have normally been interested in it"

Matthew Barney, Artist

"Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness"

George Jean Nathan, Editor

"Motion pictures are the art form of the 20th century, and one of the reasons is the fact that films are a slightly corrupted artform. They fit this century - they combine Art and business!"

Roger Corman, Producer

"Martial art is a form of expression, an expression from your inner self to your hands and legs"

Donnie Yen, Actor

"The Internet is both great and terrible. As a source of information, a tool for delivering music and art, it's great. But spamming ads and piracy of music is terrible. It's stealing"

Gary Wright, Musician

"Such discussions help us very little to enjoy what has been well done in art or poetry, to discriminate between what is more and what is less excellent in them, or to use words like beauty, excellence, art, poetry, with a more precise meaning than they would otherwise have"

Walter Pater, Critic

"True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation"

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Poet

"I met my wife Anne who was a sociology student, and her influence together with activities associated with the student movement of the time opened up my interests amongst other things into the theatre, art, music, politics and philosophy"

Paul Nurse, Scientist

"Never can the innate power of a work be hidden or locked away. A work of art can be forgotten by time; it can be forbidden and rejected but the elemental will always prevail over the ephemeral"

Stefan Zweig, Writer

"I believe in advertisement and media completely. My art and my personal life are based in it. I think that the art world would probably be a tremendous reservoir for everybody involved in advertising"

Jeff Koons, Artist

"The Smithsonian museums are among this country's most endearing treasures and I look forward to helping maintain and enhance their coveted works of art"

Xavier Becerra, Politician

"The art of being a slave is to rule one's master"

Diogenes of Sinope, Philosopher

"I believe that my art gets across the point that I'm in this morality theater trying to help the underdog, and I'm speaking socially here, showing concern and making psychological and philosophical statements for the underdog"

Jeff Koons, Artist

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