Art Quotes

I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day.

Vincent Van Gogh

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Love of beauty is Taste. The creation of beauty is Art.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Leon Trotsky

What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.

Oscar Wilde

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Alexander Trocchi

Vision is the true creative rhythm.

Robert Delaunay

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Robert Motherwell

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Grandma Moses

Every good painter paints what he is.

Jackson Pollock

Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.

Gertrude Stein

It is a great art to saunter.

Henry David Thoreau

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.

Claude Monet

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

Simone Weil

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

George Bernard Shaw

Art thou less a slave by being loved and favoured by thy master? Thou art indeed well off, slave. Thy master favours thee; he will soon beat thee.

Blaise Pascal

Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

Groucho Marx

The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men's lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.

John Ruskin