Art Quotes

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

William Faulkner

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

William Faulkner

To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.

Henry Ward Beecher

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

Oscar Wilde

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

Benjamin Franklin

Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need.

Will Rogers

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.

Oscar Wilde

Art begins in imitation and ends in innovation.

Mason Cooley

If thou art a man, admire those who attempt great things, even though they fail.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

It's clever, but is it Art?

Rudyard Kipling

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

Pablo Picasso

I want to serve chess through games, books that are works of art. I would like to bring the game closer to many people all over the world.

Garry Kasparov

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Marshall McLuhan

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

Pablo Casals

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Gunther Grass

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.

Leonardo da Vinci

Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement... for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.

Max Beckmann

The art of creation lies in the gift of perceiving the particular and generalizing it, thus creating the particular again. It is therefore a powerful transforming force and a generator of creative solutions in relation to a given problem. It is the currency of human exchanges, which enables the sharing of states of the soul and conscience, and the discovery of new fields of experience.

Yehudi Menuhin

With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a