We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.

Scott Adams

Those who educate children well are more to be honored than parents, for these only gave life, those the art of living well.

Aristotle

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.

Aristotle

The stage is not merely the meeting place of all the arts, but is also the return of art to life.

Oscar Wilde

Life imitates art more than art imitates life.

Oscar Wilde

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

Oscar Wilde

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their own peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their own peril.

Oscar Wilde

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.

Oscar Wilde

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing, as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than the imagination when awake?

Leonardo da Vinci

No man ever reached to excellence in any one art or profession without having passed through the slow and painful process of study and preparation.

Horace Mann

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

Vincent van Gogh

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

Vincent van Gogh

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

The refusal to rest content, the willingness to risk excess on behalf of one's obsessions, is what distinguishes artists from entertainers, and what makes some artists adventurers on behalf of us all.

John Updike

Where the spirit does not work with the hand there is no art.

Leonardo da Vinci

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.

Confucius

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

The art of a people is a true mirror of their minds.

Jawaharlal Nehru

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others.

Jonathan Swift

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself.

Abraham Maslow

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, everyday, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

Christopher Morley

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

Good art is art that allows you to enter it from a variety of angles and to emerge with a variety of views.

Mary Schmich

The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.

Agnes De Mille

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

Albert Einstein

...one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into the world of objective perception and thought.

Albert Einstein

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.

Albert Einstein

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It's the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science. Whoever does not know it can no longer wander, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.

Albert Einstein

After a certain high level of technical skill is achieved, science and art tend to coalesce in esthetics, plasticity, and form. The greatest sceintists are always artists as well.

Albert Einstein

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.

Theodore Dreiser

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

Politics has always been the art of the possible. Today it's too often the art of the probable - tinkering around the edges without any greater vision, without a sense of optimism and imagination.

Senator John Kerry

Art is... a question mark in the minds of those who want to know what's happening.

Aaron Howard

It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.

Loren Eiseley

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

Genius can probably run on ahead and seek out new ways; but the good artists who follow after genius - and I count myself among these - have to restore the lost connection once more.

Kathe Kollwitz

Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.

Walter H. Pater

Abstract art is a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

The ability to get to the verge without getting into the war is the necessary art.. if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.

John Foster Dulles

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite; you can't have both.

Ben Hecht

Look. Art knows no prejudice, art knows no boundaries, art doesn't really have judgement in it's purest form. So just go, just go.

K. D. Lang

Agriculture for an honorable and highminded man, is the best of all occupations or arts by which men procure the means of living.

Xenophon

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

The art of government consists in taking as much money as possible from one class of the citizens to give to the other.

Voltaire

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

The oldest of the arts and the youngest of the professions.

Derek Bok

One of the jobs of art is to inspire discussion, and Brokeback Mountain certainly has done that. It's like a window and a mirror. You're looking through a window at lives you may or may not have experienced. But it's a mirror in the sense we've all felt lonely; we're all, at one time or another, looking for and hoping for love.

Diana Ossana

Art is accusation, expression, passion. Art is a fight to the finish between black charcoal and white paper.

Gunter Grass

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

The temple of art is built in words.

Josiah Gilbert Holland

To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth.

Auguste Rodin

The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things.

Henry Ward Beecher

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

The avantgarde are people who don't exactly know where they want to go, but are the first to get there.

Romain Gary

Art is Nature made by Man To Man the interpreter of God.

Owen Meredith

The blues is an art of ambiguity, an assertion of the irrepressibly human over all circumstances, whether created by others or by one's own human failing.

Ralph Ellison

Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers - and never succeeding.

Gian Carlo Menotti

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What can this piece of paper do; imagine?

Alamgir Hashmi

It basically was an art before. We're just starting to scratch it into a science.

Dennis Conner

The work of art must seize upon you, wrap you up in itself and carry you away. It is the means by which the artist conveys his passion. It is the current which he puts forth, which sweeps you along in his passion.

Pierre auguste Renoir

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Auguste Rodin

Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunman have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

Don DeLillo

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

If we learn the art of yielding what must be yielded to the changing present, we can save the best of the past.

Dean Acheson

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

Art is made to disturb. Science reassures.

Georges Braque

All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music, because, in its ideal, consummate moments, the end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the expression; and to it therefore, to the condition of its perf.

Walter H. Pater

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

They are more beautiful than anything in the world, kinetic sculptures, perfect form in motion.

Kate Millett

The artist does not illustrate science (but) he frequently responds to the same interests that a scientist does.

Lewis Mumford

Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with whichto shape it.

Bertolt Brecht

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

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

Jean Cocteau

There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.

Sir William Osler

Most artists are surrealists.. always dreaming something and then they paint it.

Dong Kingman

In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it.

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Beverly Sills

Art is the triumph over chaos.

John Cheever

Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down.

Malcolm De Chazal

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

Art hath an enemy called Ignorance.

Ben Jonson

I like to pretend that my art has nothing to do with me.

Roy Lichtenstein

Art is not in some far-off place. A work of Art is the expression of a man's whole personality, sensibility and ability.

Shinichi Suzuki

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

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

Walt Whitman

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

John Ciardi

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

Art depends on luck and talent.

Francis Ford Coppola

However much you are read in theory, if thou hast no practice thou art ignorant.

Muslih uddin Sadi

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

Every good painter paints what he is.

Jackson Pollack

Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too.

Jan Morris

I had some money, I made the best paintings ever. I was completely reclusive, worked a lot, took a lot of drugs. I was awful to people.

Jean michel Basquiat

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

Great art picks up where nature ends.

Marc Chagall

To choose art means to turn one's back on the world, or at least on certain of its distractions.

Melvin Maddocks

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

The role of art is to make a world which can be tolerated.

William Saroyan

If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right.

Maxwell L. Anderson

I haled me a woman from the street, Shameless but oh so fair, I bade her sit in the model's seat, And I painted her sitting there.

Robert Service

You always feel better when you sing. Music touches people's hearts. You know, it doesn't go through your mental capacity, it just moves you and it will let you cry. It's worth it doing a show and when you touch a crowd and move yourself at the same.

Bonnie Jewell

Art has no enemy except ignorance.

Latin Proverb

An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.

James Whistler

What makes people the world over stand in line for Van Gogh is not that they will see beautiful pictures [but] that in an indefinable way they will come away feeling better human beings. And that is exactly what Van Gogh hoped for.

John Russell

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for competitors.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I am following Nature without being able to grasp her...I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.

Claude Monet

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

An artist must never be a prisoner. Prisoner? An artist should never be a prisoner of himself, prisoner of style, prisoner of reputation, prisoner of success, etc.

Henri Matisse

One is called a criminal for being different, and malicious for observing other people with too much clarity and penetration. But what if one began with oneself?

Andre Suares

The art galleries of Paris contain the finest collection of frames I ever saw.

Humphrey Davy

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

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

Nadine Gordimer

To send light into the darkness of men's hearts - such is the duty of the artist.

Robert A. Schumann

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

I'm a passionate believer in the inherent creativity possessed by all people and our inherent ability--if it's not clouded by convention--to appreciate authentic beauty in all forms, whether we like it or not.

Porter Arneill

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.

Giorgio De Chirico

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Herman Melville

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Theodor W. Adorno

In art, truth and reality begin when one no longer understands what one is doing or what one knows, and when there remains an energy that is all the stronger for being constrained, controlled and compressed.

Henri Matisse

Journalism is the art of collecting varying kinds of information (commonly called "news") which a few people possess and of transmitting it to a much larger number of people who are supposed to desire to share it.

Henry R. Luce

Poetry is the art of creating imaginary gardens with real toads.

Marianne Moore

I don't need the money, dear. I work for art.

Maria Callas

Remember the great adversity of art or anything else is a hurried life.

Robert James Waller

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

Art is unquestionably one of the purest and highest elements in human happiness. It trains the mind through the eye, and the eye through the mind. As the sun colors flowers, so does art color life.

John Lubbock

The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work.

Berthold Auerbach

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Paul Gauguin

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

Trash has given us an appetite for art.

Pauline Kael

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.

William Cullen Bryant

Teaching is an instinctual art, mindful of potential, craving of realizations, a pausing, seamless process.

A. Bartlett Giamatti

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man.

Bernard Berenson

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

David Hockney

Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.

Lincoln Steffens

Patience is the art of hoping.

Vauvenargues, Marquis De

Italy is certainly the native country of this art: and yet, I do not find the people in general either more musically inclined, or better provided with ears than their neighbors.

Tobias G. Smollett

Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.

Pablo Picasso

Ideas aren't real estate, they grow collectively and that knocks out the egotistical loneliness that generally infects art.

Robert Redford

What is art but a way of seeing?

Saul Bellow

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Northrop Frye

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

If Goddess religion is not to become mindless idiocy, we must win clear of tendency of magic to become supertition. Magic - and among its branches I include psychology as its purpose to describe and change consciousness - is an art.

Starhawk

Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.

Karl Marx

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

It is the artist's business to create sunshine when the sun fails.

Romain Rolland

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

We all know that art is not the truth, art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.

Pablo Picasso

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.

Edith Hamilton

The conditions you need to be a good goalkeeper are exactly the same conditions you need to be a good sculptor. You must have a very good connection, in both professions, with time and space.

Eduardo Chillida

Art is not a thing; it is a way.

Elbert Hubbard

There are two men inside the artist, the poet and the craftsman. One is born a poet. One becomes a craftsman.

Emile Zola

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Ernst Fischer

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure - if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Ethel Barrymore

What moves those of genius, what inspires their work is not new ideas, but their obsession with the idea that what has already been said is still not enough.

Eugene Delacroix

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Eugene Ionesco