Art Quotes

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

John Drummond

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Louis Kronenberger

A hint - don't paint too much direct from nature. Art is an abstraction! study nature then brood on it and treasure the creation which will result, which is the only way to ascend towards God - to create like our Divine Master.

Paul Gauguin

Caricature is rough truth.

George Meredith

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Simone de Beauvoir

Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.

Dorothea Lange

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Christian Nevell Bovee

Good painters imitate nature, bad ones spew it up.

Miguel de Cervantes

Is not a patron, my lord, one who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help? The notice which you have been pleased to take of my labors, had it been early, had been kind; but it has been delayed till I am indifferent, and cannot enjoy it; till I am solitary, and cannot impart it; till I am known, and do not want it.

Samuel Johnson

Patron: One who countenances, supports or protects. Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.

Samuel Johnson

Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist, in love with art, smitten with art history. You're also a woman, with almost no mentors to look to art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country, a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.

Jerry Saltz

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Willa Cather

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

Willa Cather

Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don't mind, I'm just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn't really a mainstream anymore, is there?

David Hockney

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Andre Breton

I am not a great cook, I am not a great artist, but I love art, and I love food, so I am the perfect traveller.

Michael Palin

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

Toni Morrison

Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven't.

Jonathan Safran Foer

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Norman Mailer