Art Quotes

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Daniel Barenboim

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Jos

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Angela Carter

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Adrienne Rich

I do not paint a portrait to look like the subject, rather does the person grow to look like his portrait.

Salvador Dali

It is either easy or impossible.

Salvador Dali

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Salvador Dali

A good painter is to paint two main things, men and the working of man's mind.

Leonardo DaVinci

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Lionel Trilling

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Andrea Dworkin

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

New arts destroy the old.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The true poem is the poet's mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Art is the path of the creator to his work.

Ralph Waldo Emerson