Art Quotes

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Jacques Barzun

There was a big drive when I was at art school to make you aware of the economy of meaning - after all, this was still during the tail end of minimalism. Being responsible for everything you put in your picture, and being able to defend it. Keeping everything clear around you so you know what is operating. To open the wound and keep it clean.

Jane Campion

Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image.

Aldous Huxley

Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.

Theodor Adorno

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world.

Edward Hopper

The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.

Martha Graham

So vast is art, so narrow human wit.

Alexander Pope

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I don't watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.

Stephen Fry

Until they throw the money changers out of the temple of art, it will never be a real temple.

Leo Tolstoy

The art world is an all-volunteer force. No one has to be here if he or she doesn't want to be, and we should be associating with anyone we want to.

Jerry Saltz

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.

Marcel Proust

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tristan Tzara

The object of art is to give life a shape. Midsummer Nights Dream

William Shakespeare

O, had I but followed the arts!

William Shakespeare

I'm noticing a new approach to art making in recent museum and gallery shows. It flickered into focus at the New Museum's 'Younger Than Jesus' last year and ran through the Whitney Biennial, and I'm seeing it blossom and bear fruit at 'Greater New York,' MoMA P.S. 1's twice-a-decade extravaganza of emerging local talent.

Jerry Saltz

The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.

Robert Louis Stevenson

There's a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There's a lot of sex, you know, in art. There's a lot of naked women and men, and there's intrigue, there's fakery. It's a real microcosm of the larger world.

Steve Martin

The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.

Gustave Flaubert

Logic is neither an art nor a science but a dodge.

Stendhal