Art Quotes

The secret of life is in art.

Oscar Wilde

A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed, it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art.

Charles Rosen

To my mind, a picture should be something pleasant, cheerful, and pretty, yes pretty! There are too many unpleasant things in life as it is without creating still more of them.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Whatever the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth -whether it existed before or not

John Keats

Listen to your inner-voice: Surround yourself with loving, nurturing people. Fall in love with your art and find yourself. Music is the great communicator.

Glenn Hughes

Art does not exist only to entertain -- but also to challenge one to think, to provoke, even to disturb, in a constant search for the truth.

Barbara Streisand

A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Richard Avedon

Take the time to discover how African-Americans have had a great impact on this country. In science, education, literature, art, and politics.

Lynn Swann

Always suffer delusions of grandeur with your art. What you are unable to face will never hurt you

Ginnetta Correli

On the whole, lying is a cheerful affair. Embellishments are intended to give pleasure. People long to tell you what they imagine you want to hear. They want to amuse you; they want to amuse themselves; they want to show you a good time. This is beyond hospitality. This is art.

Isabel Fonseca

Within this new work of art a creature from beyond the reach of Humanity has insinuated herself and now lurks there at the heart of the mystery, a power unimagined before our time.

Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Ad

Innate in nearly every artistic nature is a wanton, treacherous penchant for accepting injustice when it creates beauty and showing sympathy for and paying homage to aristocratic privilege.

Thomas Mann

Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.

Joseph Campbell

In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.

Elizabeth Gilbert

A modern poet has characterized the personality of art and the impersonality of science as follows: Art is I: Science is We.

Claude Bernard

In this job an illusion of beauty is sold which doesn't really exist like that. It's like a work of art, an act. I cry in front of the camera but am not really sad. I've just come from a job, am made-up and made to look beautiful with fantastic clothes and hair and nails all done.

Heidi Klum

Marriage, sanctified by the bond of fidelity, is the nearest life gets to a work of art.

Jonathan Sacks

Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold. Their knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form which is exercised for amusement or for show. It is a proof of the shallowness of the doctrine of beauty, as it lies in the minds of our amateurs, that men seem to have lost the perception of the instant dependence of form upon soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Let the sweet hope that Thou art mine, My life and death attend; Thy presence through my journey shine, And crown my journey's end.

Anne Steele

Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and externals cooperate.

Hippocrates