Art Quotes

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?

Ludwig van Beethoven

Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.

Leo Tolstoy

A life without books is a thirsty life, and one without poetry is...like a life without pictures.

Stephen King

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

David Hockney

Art is the daughter of freedom.

Friedrich Schiller

Via?a nu e suport pentru art?. Invers stau lucrurile.

Stephen King

Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.

Frank Zappa

If you are going to break a Law of Art, make the crime interesting.

Mason Cooley

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca (Seneca the Elder)

You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

Orson Scott Card

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Adolf Berle

Having acknowledged the measure of the good to be pleasure, i.e., beauty, the European upper classes went back in their comprehension of art to the gross conception of the primitive Greeks which Plato had already condemned. And with this understanding of life, a theory of art was formulated.

Leo Tolstoy

While I know that the beautiful, the spiritual and the sublime are suspect today, I have begun to stop resisting the constant urge to deny that beauty has a valid right to exist in contemporary art.

Ian Hornak, "Cover Magazine", 19

Parameters are the things you bounce off to create art.

Neil Gaiman

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Alexander Pope

It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

He who first shortened the labor of copyists by device of movable types was disbanding hired armies, and cashiering most kings and senates, and creating a whole new democratic world: he had invented the art of printing.

Thomas Carlyle

Depend upon it, the first universal characteristic of all great art is Tenderness, as the second is Truth. I find this more and more every day: an infinitude of tenderness is the chief gift and inheritance of all the truly great men. It is sure to involve a relative intensity of disdain towards base things, and an appearance of sternness and arrogance in the eyes of all hard, stupid, and vulgar peopleFrom: An Inaugural Lecture, Delivered at the Kensington Museum, January, 1858.

John Ruskin, The Two Paths

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

Jean Cocteau

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Eliza Farnham