Quotes about art

It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

My focus is my art, and that's what I love to do. I have to be really passionate in order to do something. I've turned down many things that I just didn't believe in.

Once you realize that it is impossible to capture the character of the various manifestations of nature by pictorial means, and that an interpretation based on imagination is equally erroneous, you will not find yourself facing a gaping void as you might have feared.

Art is the absence of fear.

Love, Hope, and Joy, fair pleasure's smiling train, Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of pain, These mix'd with art, and to due bounds confin'd Make and maintain the balance of the mind.

The art of government is not to let me grow stale.

Your work speaks for you. Your art defines you.

A lot of people in the art world hate to use the word "Photoshop", like it's cheating or easy or something. I say bollocks to that - for me, it's my tool, my paintbrush if you like, and lets me create my own visual language.

I don't need to live my art and almost die to understand my heroines. I want to love my sons, live quietly, eat good food, have meaningful friendships in and out of work and have a very large wine collection.

I love looking at vintage for inspiration; go see movies, art galleries, watch people on the street, you have to really keep your eyes open and see how you can reinterpret the old and make it modern and relevant again.

It's not possible to present an accurate picture of our culture without all the voices of the people in the culture. So at the emerging level, you can't have a good survey art show without women and artists of color.

Sometimes it's good to get mad, sometimes it clarifies where we stand. I think that art has the ability to challenge and push, and that's great. That's better than great... it's necessary.

Sadly I don't sing. I missed it for a long time, but my daughter Emma said something wonderful when I was feeling blue one day: "Mom, you've just found a different way of using your voice, and that's with your books." In a way, she's right. It's just a different way of expressing what I feel about music, individuality, art and all the things I've always loved.

I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they're good or there because they're lucky.

There may be no single thing more important in our efforts to achieve meaningful work and fulfilling relationships than to learn to practice the art of communication.

I collect art, and I drink wine... things that I like that I had never been exposed to. But I never said, 'I'm going to buy art to impress this crowd.' That's just ridiculous to me. I don't live my life like that, because how could you be happy with yourself?

Facility is an obstacle to any creativeness. In any art form. You get a nice effect without effort, sometimes by accident, and you're satisfied; but there's nothing substantial underneath.

There can be no freedom in art and literature where the government determines who shall create them.

The whole idea of worship being associated with music, it gives you an impotence to make art that is true, that is honest and that opens the human heart to God and to reality.

I used to think that great art happened without argument, and maybe that’s not the case. Maybe the things that are most important in this life, you have to fight for.

In this world of lies, Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth, even though it be covertly, and by snatches.

I try not to make any boundaries. I try to let all art influence me.

Creating a wonderful drama is an art form, while comedy is just entertainment.

I'd always wanted to tell people that when I work on my body I'm thinking about classical sculpture, so I jumped at the chance to show off body building as an art form.

I think pornography is the only art form where you can be videotaped on a shaky handy cam sucking off a horse and be considered a star.

Shall we have recourse to the art of printing? But this has not destroyed property or aristocracy or corporations or paper wealth in England or America, or diminished the influence of either; on the contrary, it has multiplied aristocracy and diminished democracy.

You know what's it's changed is my appreciate for the art form of making cinema. I don't want to act as much as I want to tell stories. I want to be a part of the whole collective and pull all of the pieces together. That's what I love about directing.

The art of biography is different from geography. Geography is about maps, but biography is about chaps.

Every work of art is about everything.

I admire people who find that what fulfills them is their art or their work, but what fulfills both me and my husband is our family. Knowing that, everything else comes second. We've each given up stuff we loved in order to not work at the same time.

The art of healing is like an unroofed temple, uncovered at the top and cracked at the foundation.

Poetry is one of the oldest of all art forms, and one of its powers for shamans and tribal leaders was the mnemonic.

I would say if you are familiar with our history and the history of our art and literature that you see a clear cut pattern of people wanting to contribute, not only artistically, but in some practical purpose, for the benefits of the community.

The recipe for great art has always been misery and a good bowel movement.

Maturity is the art of living in peace with that which cannot be changed, the courage to change that which should be changed, no matter what it takes, and the wisdom to know the difference.

The forms of art are inexhaustible; but all lead by the same road of aesthetic emotion to the same world of aesthetic ecstasy.

Use your art to fight.

I suffer for my art and despise the witless moneyed scoundrels who praise it.

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

Since art is merely and ultimately self-expressive, we conclude that the fullest art, the most individual, uninfluenced, unrepressed, uninhibited expression of art is true expression and the true art.

Have you ever learned the beautiful art of letting God take care of you and giving all your thought and strength to pray for others and for the kingdom of God? It will relieve you of a thousand cares.

I think that's becoming the key to where the whole idea of art and culture are going nowadays anyway, is the idea of curation. Knowing what you like. That's sort of the future right now. Molding something, whether it be a roster on a label, or your blog, or a song, or your DJ set.

For artists, scientists, inventors, schoolchildren, and the rest of us, intrinsic motivation-the drive to do something because it is interesting, challenging, and absorbing-is essential for high levels of creativity.

Hip-hop don't have no fresh energy, none at all. It's money driven, everybody tryin' to make that cheque, nobody putting art in their albums any more.

I just tried to be an artist in my own metier.

The minute we don't finance the arts, the accountants, attorneys and politicians keep taking the cream of money off the top and it doesn't trickle down unless all of society understands that we must support the arts, whether it's ballet, opera, fashion. Fashion is like opera, is like ballet, is like theatre. It's a visual theatre.

The great end of all human industry is the attainment of happiness. For this were arts invented, sciences cultivated, laws ordained, and societies modeled, by the most profound wisdom of patriots and legislators. Even the lonely savage, who lies exposed to the inclemency of the elements and the fury of wild beasts, forgets not, for a moment, this grand object of his being.

The art of the police is not to see what it is useless that it should see.

I see all art as a complement to telling people's stories. I'm in the storytelling business. I believe that the humanity that all of us share is the stories of our lives, and everybody has a story. Your story is as important as the next person's story.

I present the thing we're going to do as a simple starting point. They all know it's an art piece and that it's all going to be recorded. And I have never had an experience where one of these men tried to take advantage of the situation. If they were guilty of anything it was of being lonely. It was never that they were violent or dangerous.

Feed the body food and drink, it will survive today. Feed the soul art and music, it will live forever.

The key elements in the art of working together are how to deal with change, how to deal with conflict, and how to reach our potential...the needs of the team are best met when we meet the needs of individual persons.

How pale is the art of sorcerers, witches, and conjurors when compared with that of the government's Treasury Department!

The danger of art created to rise above the noise is that it may end up being noise itself.

I've always been fascinated with the strong emotional ties that music can have. A song can bring you back to a place or a season of life like no other art form can.

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

One important thing, just being a film composer in general, is to have a great respect for the art that you're working on - a great respect for the film and a great respect for the filmmakers.

Unlike with any other art form, filmmakers have this unique web of festivals. There are hundreds. It is a democratic system in which you submit films, and if they are good enough, they play. The only barrier to entry is the submission fee.

Whenever serious art loses track of its roots in the vernacular, then it begins to atrophy.

Originality in art puts charm where it wasn't.

Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of Men and deny equal privileges to others; the Constitution of the Republic should make a Special privilege for medical freedoms as well as religious freedom.

I love watching Rihanna in fashion. I like to see her take chances and risks. I like seeing Naomi Campbell in the forefront. They're both women who stand out and use their bodies as canvases to introduce this functional art to the world. They carry it in a way that is very inspiring.

All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest - never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principles of equal partnership.

A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.

The language of art is celestial in origin and can only be understood by the chosen.

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.

Persons of genius, and those who are most capable of art, are always most fond of nature: as such are chiefly sensible, that all art consists in the imitation and study of nature.

Fortunately art is a community effort - a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

I tried to show that fashion is an art. For that, I followed the counsel of my master Christian Dior and the imperishable lesson of Mademoiselle Chanel. I created for my era and I tried to foresee what tomorrow would be.

We're all works of art in progress.

Among the arts of conversation no one pleases more than mutual deference or civility, which leads us to resign our own inclinations to those of our companions, and to curb and conceal that presumption and arrogance so natural to the human mind.

The art of land warfare is an art of genius, of inspiration. On the sea nothing is genius or inspiration; everything is positive or empiric.

I think it's a really good idea to be bumping into all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. So you make art with strangers. You give a reading. You move somewhere new and try to build a life. You grapple with humanity.

The noise around us determines how we speak. And how we listen. Just as a conversation suffers in a war zone, art suffers in a culture built on noise. So does our enjoyment of it.