Art Quotes

Beauty was darkness till she came. Then paint her eyes, whose active light Shall make the former shadows bright, And with their every beam supply New day, to draw her picture by.

James Shirley, To the Painter Pr

Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.

Frederic Chopin

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Henry Geldzahler

[] Everyone tries to make his life a work of art. We want love to last and we know that it does not last; even if, by some miracle, it were to last a whole lifetime, it would still be incomplete. Perhaps, in this insatiable need for perpetuation, we should better understand human suffering, if we knew that it was eternal. It appears that great minds are, sometimes, less horrified by suffering than by the fact that it does not endure. In default of inexhaustible happiness, eternal suffering would at least give us a destiny. But we do not even have that consolation, and our worst agonies come to an end one day. One morning, after many dark nights of despair, an irrepressible longing to live will announce to us the fact that all is finished and that suffering has no more meaning than happiness.

Albert Camus

Auction houses run a rigged game. They know exactly how many people will be bidding on a work and exactly who they are. In a gallery, works of art need only one person who wants to pay for them.

Jerry Saltz

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

He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.

Arthur Balfour

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.

Henry Ward Beecher

I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I tell them the truth and they never believe me.

Camillo di Cavour

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

Karl Marx

To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.

Robert Schumann

Art is never finished, only abandoned.

Leonardo da Vinci

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

Pablo Picasso

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.

Robert Motherwell

What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!

Anatole France

If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

Kurt Vonnegut

All I owe the world is my art.

Sherman Alexie

A metaphysical tour de force of untethered meaning and involuting interlocking contrapuntal rhythms, 'The Clock' is more than a movie or even a work of art. It is so strange and other-ish that it becomes a stream-of-consciousness algorithm unto itself - something almost inhuman.

Jerry Saltz

A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.

Michelangelo

I like that the art world isn't regulated.

Jerry Saltz