Art Quotes
Vincent Van Gogh
It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done.
1337 Chuck Klosterman
Art and love are the same thing: It’s the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.
4586 George Bernard Shaw
A photographer is like a cod, which produces a million eggs in order that one may reach maturity.
2897 George Bernard Shaw
A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
3137 Jen Knox
Only by examining our personal biases can we truly grow as artists; only by cultivating empathy can we truly grow as people.
1638 Pablo Picasso
Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth.
3696 Auguste Rodin
Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages.
3069 Brian Raif
Art is the overflow of emotion into action.
1974 Nikki Rowe
Her life is lived through the masterpiece of art, that she cannot draw.
3574 Eric Samuel Timm
Actions speak louder than words, in fact. When we don't take action, we foster the mistaken reality of our old identity.
4379 Jayme K.
Art does what reality cannot.
2426 Bryant McGill
The Arts are the only acceptable theatre of war for peace.
4939 Karl Lagerfeld
Absurdity and anti - absurdity are the two poles of creative energy.
2643 Rebecca Solnit
The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.
1693 Jonathan Culver
If it aint broke, break it. Then build something better.
3103 N. Scott Momaday
My father was a painter and he taught art. He once said to me, 'I never knew an Indian child who could not draw.'
4206 Clive Barker
any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.
3859 Coco Chanel
There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.
1744 Woody Allen
Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.
4086 Groucho Marx
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, uh... now you tell me what you know.
3626 Salvador Dalí
Every morning when I wake up, I experience an exquisite joy - the joy of being Salvador Dalí - and I ask myself in rapture: What wonderful things is this Salvador Dalí going to accomplish today?
4964 Jason Mraz
Here’s to freedom, cheers to art. Here’s to having an excellent adventure and may the stopping never start.
1912 Hugh MacLeod
Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten. Then when you hit puberty they take the crayons away and replace them with dry, uninspiring books on algebra, history, etc. Being suddenly hit years later with the 'creative bug' is just a wee voice telling you, 'I'd like my crayons back, please.
2876 Viggo Mortensen
You don't have to make something that people call art. Living is an artistic activity, there is an art to getting through the day.
3779 Émile Zola
If you ask me what I came to do in this world, I, an artist, will answer you: I am here to live out loud.
3630 John Keats
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
3080 Danny Kaye
Life is a blank canvas, and you need to throw all the paint on it you can.
2714 John Irving
It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious.
2470 Karl Lagerfeld
Fashion and music are the same, because music express its period too.
4400 Don Roff
The recipe for great art has always been misery and a good bowel movement.
1698 Brian Keene
Good ideas stay with you until you eventually write the story.
1103 Banksy
Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.
1691 Khaled Hosseini
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
2483 Brenda Ueland
Everybody is original, if he tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his *true* self and not from the self he thinks he *should* be.
4206 Aberjhani
Poetry and art nourish the soul of the world with the flavor-filled substances of beauty, wisdom and truth.
3481 Dejan Stojanovic
Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art - a euphemism - tamed wilderness.
2656 Karl Lagerfeld
We need houses as we need clothes, architecture stimulates fashion. It’s like hunger and thirst - you need them both.
2862 George Saunders
In art, and maybe just in general, the idea is to be able to be really comfortable with contradictory ideas. In other words, wisdom might be, seem to be, two contradictory ideas both expressed at their highest level and just let to sit in the same cage sort of, vibrating. So, I think as a writer, I'm really never sure of what I really believe.
4815 Karl Lagerfeld
Don’t overact the story of your name. Overact the story of your work.
4042 Benjamin J. Carey
At the end of the day your ability to connect with your readers comes down to how you make them feel.
2587 N.K. Jemisin
In the future, as in the present, as in the past, black people will build many new worlds.
This is true. I will make it so. And you will help me.
1840 Lady Gaga
When you make music or write or create, it's really your job to have mind-blowing, irresponsible, condomless sex with whatever idea it is you're writing about at the time.
2277 Dylan Thomas
A good poem is a contribution to reality. The world is never the same once a good poem has been added to it. A good poem helps to change the shape of the universe, helps to extend everyone's knowledge of himself and the world around him.
2927 Pablo Picasso
Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
2630 Chuck Palahniuk
The first step - especially for young people with energy and drive and talent, but not money - the first step to controlling your world is to control your culture. To model and demonstrate the kind of world you demand to live in. To write the books. Make the music. Shoot the films. Paint the art.
3395 Alice Walker
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
3391 Flannery O'Connor
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
3291 Austin Kleon
Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.
2638 Orson Scott Card
You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.
2866 Arthur Rimbaud
True alchemy lies in this formula: ‘Your memory and your senses are but the nourishment of your creative impulse’.
2447 John Waters
Collect books, even if you don't plan on reading them right away. Nothing is more important than an unread library.
2546 Steven Pressfield
We must do our work for its own sake, not for fortune or attention or applause.
1558 Flannery O'Connor
There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself.
3234 Umberto Eco
When the writer (or the artist in general) says he has worked without giving any thought to the rules of the process, he simply means he was working without realizing he knew the rules.
1074 Jorge Luis Borges
He thought that the rose was to be found in its own eternity and not in his words; and that we may mention or allude to a thing, but not express it.
3234 Joyce Carol Oates
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.
2195 SARK
Create a guidebook of creative dreams
You can use a blank book or just blank paper clipped together. Put photographs or scraps from magazines in that represent your creative dreams. Draw, scribble, or paint in between the images. Make a list of creative dreams you've thought of or admire in others.
3900 Jyrki Vainonen
Dive again and again into the river of uncertainty. Create in the dark, only then can you recognize the light.
2234 Ginnetta Correli
Always suffer delusions of grandeur with your art. What you are unable to face will never hurt you
3972 Julian Barnes
Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.
2638 SARK
Identifying Your Dream
Some people can easily identify one primary dream. For others, a dream is more elusive. These people often have many dreams at once, or a general idea of a dream that never takes a specific shape.
3227 Haruki Murakami
That's how it is with art. Mere humans who root through their refrigerators at three o'clock in the morning are incapable of such writing.
4087 Charles Baudelaire
He possessed the logic of all good intentions and a knowledge of all the tricks of his trade, and yet he never succeeded at anything, because he believed too much in the impossible. Surprising? Why so? He was forever in the act of conceiving it!
3217 Arthur Holitscher
I spoke fire, laughed smoke, and madness spilled forth from my inspiration.
1277 Gretel Ehrlich
The truest art I would strive for in any work would be to give the page the same qualities as earth: weather would land on it harshly; light would elucidate the most difficult truths; wind would sweep away obtuse padding.
1338 Ursula K. Le Guin
I think the mystery of art lies in this, that artists’ relationship is essentially with their work - not with power, not with profit, not with themselves, not even with their audience.
3871 SARK
Our creative dreams are subject to grudge-holding when we decide that other people somehow have made their dreams real and we have not.
4058 Toni Morrison
Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
1103 Christy Leigh Stewart
A novel is no different than graffiti in a bathroom stall, it's just more pretentious.
3355 Louis L'Amour
The key to understanding any people is in its art: its writing, painting, sculpture.
2975 Marvin Harris
I don't see how you can write anything of value if you don't offend someone.
2458 Roman Payne
Fueled by my inspiration, I ran across the room to steal the cup of coffee the bookshelf had taken prisoner. Lapping the black watery brew like a hyena, I tossed the empty cup aside. I then returned to the chair to continue my divine act of creation. Hot blood swished in my head as my mighty pen stole across the page.
3328 Thomas Hardy
My weakness has always been to prefer the large intention of an unskilful artist to the trivial intention of an accomplished one: in other words, I am more interested in the high ideas of a feeble executant than in the high execution of a feeble thinker.
4516 Albert Camus
In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul
2115 Ren Garcia
Trying to live up to yourself is the most trying thing.
3872 Annie Dillard
There is neither a proportional relationship, nor an inverse one, between a writer’s estimation of a work in progress & its actual quality. The feeling that the work is magnificent, & the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.
3711 Marcel Proust
A work in which there are theories is like an object which still has its price-tag on.
4774 Toni Morrison
I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
4421 Toni Morrison
I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that's what an artist is―a politician.
4988 Charles Nodier
But if what interests you are stories of the fantastic, I must warn you that this kind of story demands more art and judgment than is ordinarily imagined.
3501 Alexander Pope
Music resembles poetry, in each
Are nameless graces which no methods teach,
And which a master hand alone can reach.
4653 Christina Westover
As I write, My fingers tap tap the keys the way Ravi Shankar's fingers pluck and strum the strings of his sitar.
4549 Yevgeny Zamyatin
The most effective way of destroying art is the canonization of one given form. And one philosophy.
4066 Nicholas Meyer
Art and commerce are not irreconciliable, they are inextricably intertwined.
4865 Brigid Brophy
In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not be, art is also entertainment. Bad art fails to entertain. Good art does something in addition.
4229 Gustave Flaubert
The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.
3872 Jacques Vaché
Well then – I see two ways of letting things take their course – Create one’s own sensations with the help of a flamboyant collision of rare words – not often, mind you – or else neatly draw the angles, the squares, the entire geometry of feelings – those of the moment, naturally.
3766 Beverly Lowry
The material's out there, a calm lake waiting for us to dive in.
3721 Vera Nazarian
The other day, when I was deciding where to place a mountain range, how to make a river's flow detour around underground stalactite caves, and what precise color to give the sky at sunset, I realized I was God... or an artist and a writer.
4553 Linda Olsson
It's often about the simple things, isn't it? Painting and photography are first about seeing, they say. Writing is about observing. Technique is secondary. Sometimes the simple is the most difficult.
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