Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,161,747 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
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Art
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“Looking back now toward the start You said you thought I'd lost my path And I asked if you still considered love an art And you said "No, I think it's more a craft" And I just turned and laughed I just had to turn and laugh.”
Dan Fogelberg (1951–2007) said by 2007 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Folk music is not so much a body of art as it is a process, an attitude, and a way of life; its distinguishing features lie not within the songs themselves, but in the relations of those songs to a folk culture.”
Sam Hinton (1917–2009) said by 2009 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A good work of art reveals something that is in reality.A new metaphor,a new myth,a new type of character,all these reveal a feature of reality for which we previously had no name.”
Michael Roberts (writer) first seen 1982 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Hulme and Modrern Poetry' in ' T E Hulme ',Carcanet Press,Manchester, 1982
“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 (1716–1778) first seen 1760 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 328. "The Grace of God". Adopted as a hymn by several protestant denominations, sometimes under a different title. Probab…
“It just isn't going to work, and it's very interesting that the man who invented this type of what I call a voodoo economic policy is Art Laffer, a California economist.”
Arthur Laffer (born 1940) first seen 1980 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Speech at Carnegie Mellon University (10 April 1980)
Also quoted by: George H. W. Bush
“Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah, Pilgrim through this barren land; I am weak, but Thou art mighty; Hold me with Thy powerful hand; Bread of heaven! Feed me till I want no more.”
William Williams Pantycelyn (1717–1791) said by 1791 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 263.
“Voices in the dark And the lights burn low Teach yourself the art That you never know Try to put a message through To your sweetheart Won't you like to know The secrets of the heart?”
Mike Oldfield (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let not thy peace depend on the tongues of men; for whether they judge well of thee or ill, thou art not on that account other than thyself. Where are true peace and true glory? Are they not in God?”
Isabella Fyvie Mayo (1843–1914) first seen 1895 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reported in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, p. 448.
“[M]ost of the appearing mirth in the world is not mirth, but art. The wounded spirit is not seen, but walks under a disguise.”
Robert South (1634–1716) first seen 1692 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Further Account of the Nature and Measures of Conscience" (Sermon preached at Christ Church, Oxon, October 30, 1692). Vol. 1, p. 395.
“The language of art is constituted precisely by the fact that it speaks to the self-understanding of every person, and it does this as ever present and by means of its own contemporaneousness. Indeed, precisely the contemporaneousness of the work allows it to come to expression in language. Everything depends on how something is said.”
Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) said by 2002 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Acting is not a lofty performance; it is simply the source of becoming and existing transparently. Acting, I find, is the art of frothing to the surface every raw and honest emotion. The moment an actor pretends, he loses his audience forever”
Masiela Lusha (born 1985) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It looked like lively abstract art. Symbols in search of context.”
Jeff VanderMeer (born 1968) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As the journey of "Third Text", a collaborative art project that brings together participants from all over the world, particularly from Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and Latin America, continues, the idea also begins contemplating those land-based projects which were somewhat abandoned in the early seventies.”
Rasheed Araeen (born 1935) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Art Beyond Art: Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century, London: ThirdText Publications, p. 5 (2010).
“Music is the art of sounds in the movement of time.”
Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) first seen 1923 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Essence of Music (1923)
“Compared with this art, Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire is lukewarm lemonade.”
Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924) first seen 1913 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Alban Berg's Altenberg Lieder, Letter from Busoni to his wife, dated “(Paris, le), 23. Jn. 1913,” in Busoni: Briefe an seine Frau, ed. F. Schnapp (Erlenbach-Zürich/Leipzig: Rotapfel-Verlag, 1935), 279.
“Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that’s why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.”
Robert Charles Wilson (born 1953) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A great department store, easily reached, open at all hours, is more like a good museum of art than any of the museums we have yet established.”
John Cotton Dana (1856–1929) said by 1929 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: New York Times, March 16, 2010
“When I am trying to understand the method of winning in the endgame with two bishops against the knight, chess is a science, when I admire a beautiful combination or study, then chess is art, and when I am complicating position in the approaching time trouble of my opponent, then chess is sport.”
Ashot Nadanian (born 1972) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: S'pore Chess News, 7 September 2010
“If thou hast sought happiness and missed it, but hast found wisdom instead, thou art fortunate.”
John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If thy words are wise, they will not seem so to the foolish: if they are deep the shallow will not appreciate them. Think not highly of thyself, then, when thou art praised by many.”
John Lancaster Spalding (1840–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He was the first highly educated and cultured Filipino to direct he attention of his countrymen to their illustrious men, and to their art, literature, poetry and music.”
Epifanio de los Santos (1871–1928) said by 1928 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As quoted by Hartendorp “Don Pañong – Genius" in Philippine Magazine (September 1929).
“I received from my experience in Japan an incredible sense of respect for the art of creating, not just the creative product. We're all about the product. To me, the process was also an incredibly important aspect of the total form.”
Julie Taymor (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm not religious, but I believe in the ecstasy that art and religion can create in human beings, the ecstatic or the awe — as I like to call it, you know, "a-w-e" — that it makes people feel in a way that isn't their banal, everyday feel. That they go, "My God, it transformed me. My life changed.”
Julie Taymor (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human beings are the only animals who have the capacity to envisage something that is not present or something that does not yet exist but which is merely possible. The imagination has thus been the cause of our major achievements in science and technology as well as in art and religion.”
Karen Armstrong (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Religion is hard work. Its insights are not self-evident and have to be cultivated in the same way as an appreciation of art, music, or poetry must be developed.”
Karen Armstrong (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's not easy to talk about transcendence, just as it's not easy to play or listen to a late Beethoven quartet … You have to practice quite hard, like you do with any art form. Religion is hard work.”
Karen Armstrong (born 1944) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Teach me to feel that Thou art always nigh; Teach me the struggles of the soul to bear; To check the rising doubt, the rebel sigh; Teach me the patience of unanswered prayer.”
George Croly (1780–1860) said by 1860 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 444.
“The art of compromise centers on the willingness to give up something in order to get something else in return. Successful artists get more than they give up.”
Howard Raiffa (1924–2016) said by 2016 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of course the illusion of art is to make one believe that great literature is very close to life, but exactly the opposite is true. Life is amorphous, literature is formal.”
Françoise Sagan (1935–2004) said by 2004 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The re-evaluation and rediscovery of minority art (including the cultural minority of women) is often conceived as a matter of remedying injustice and exclusiveness through doing justice to individual artists by allowing their work into the canon, which will thereby be more complete, but fundamentally unchanged. (11. Aesthetics)”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Revision, self-criticism, change-all these are essential for any art form to maintain a sense of vitality.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art is collective. Always, it has a tradition behind it. Always. And they will let some of us in but they will not let our traditions in with us or our aesthetic in with us.”
Joanna Russ (1937–2011) said by 2011 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My soul is a canvas stretched across four wooden corners and tacked with copper nails that sink into the edges of timber like teeth. My art is nothing less than my salvation.”
Keariene Muizz (born 1977) first seen 2008 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: New York Arts Magazine (December 2008)
“The art of letting go is simply about personal empowerment. Realizing what you're in charge of, realizing what you control, and more importantly, what you don't control.”
Steve Maraboli (born 1975) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One can derive the same fun from print-making as from making mud pies and great subtlety can be achieved through the use of transparent inks, half-tone screens and even accidental colour combinations, which is often where the art hides.”
Ralph Steadman (born 1936) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Attempts to juggle domestic responsibilities with artistic production have often resulted in smaller bodies of work, and often works smaller in scale, than those produced by male contemporaries. Yet art history continues to privilege prodigious output and monumental scale or conception over the selective and the intimate.”
Whitney Chadwick (1943–2026) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition (2007)
“What would Dad say, Frank wondered briefly, if he knew I was making a living as an art forger? He’d understand. As he once told me, while squinting against the hideous sunlight of a cold morning, “Frankie, if it was easy they'd have got somebody else to do it.”
Tim Powers (born 1952) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A work of art is not valued because it changes itself for each person who views it, it retains its own integrity and thus means something unique and marvelous to those who see it.”
Charles A. Reich (1928–2019) said by 2019 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Through play, we renew contact with childhood - My art is childlike.”
Karel Appel (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All the absurdity and hope are the stimulants to create. You make art to find a little hole to go on. You go through the whole to find the world again, and the absurdity is that still, somehow it is the same.. .Hopelessness and hope are the same. It's a very thin line you don't see any more. I don't believe in that line between hopelessness and hope today.”
Karel Appel (1921–2006) said by 2006 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is, of course, a luxury to create art and, on top of this, to insist on expressing one's own artistic opinion. Nothing is more luxurious than this. It is a game and a good game, at least for me; one of the few games which make life, difficult and depressing as it is sometimes, a little more interesting.”
Max Beckmann (1884–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the first Manifesto that we launched on the 8th of March, 1910, from the stage of the Chiarella Theater in Turin, we expressed our deep-rooted disgust with, our proud contempt for, and our happy rebellion against vulgarity, mediocrity, the fanatical and snobbish worship of all that is old, attitudes which are suffocating Art in our Country.”
Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: In: Rainey et al. (eds.) Futurism: An Anthology, (2009), p. 64 : Lead paragraph
“Get all the information you can about the Cubists, and about Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso. Go to Kahnweilers' (Paris art gallery). And if he's got photos of recent works – produced after I have left -, buy one or two. Bring us [the Futurists in Italy, like Boccioni himself] back all the information you can get.”
Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) first seen 1911 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote in Boccioni's letter to Gino Severini, staying in Paris in the Summer of 1911; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 27.
“[the Cubist painters who] ..continued to paint objects motionless, frozen, and all the static aspects of Nature; they worship the traditionalism of w:Poussin, of w:Ingres, of Corot, ageing and petrifying their art with an obstinate attachment to the past, which to our eyes remains totally incomprehensible.”
Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“..the characteristic motion peculiar to the object (absolute motion), with the transformations the object undergoes in its shifting in relation to the environment, mobile or immobile (relative motion; both motions should be conceived in art)”
Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) said by 1916 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Boccioni's quote on motion; as quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 328.
“Boccioni and I were swiftly persuaded that with this show in Paris we were staking our all; for a flop would have meant kissing our fine aspirations goodbye. This is why we decided to go to Paris, to see what the art situation there was like.”
Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) first seen 1913 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote in: Éclat de choses ordinaries Carrà, (1913), as quoted in Futurism, Didier Ottinger (ed.), 2008, p. 27
“The idea for this picture came to me one winter's night as I was leaving La Scala. In the foreground there is a snow sweeper with a few couples, men in top hats and elegant ladies. I think that this canvas, which is totally unknown in Italy, is one of the paintings where I best represented the concept that I had the time about my art.”
Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) first seen 1909 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 154 - Carrà is referring in this quote to his painting 'Uscita dal teatro' ('Leaving the theater'), he made in 1909
“I made the photographs just like I draw.. .I wanted the photographs [Kelly made circa 1950 in Paris] to be enlightening to my art..”
Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) first seen 1985 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. 21 : 'Kelly in conversation, summers 1985 and 1986'
“My work is about structure. It has never been a reaction to Abstract Expressionism. I saw the Abstract Expressionists for the first time in 1954. My line of influence has been the 'structure' of the things I liked: French Romanesque architecture, Byzantine, Egyptian and Oriental art, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Monet, Klee, Picasso, Beckman..”
Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. unknown : 'Notes from 1969'
“Making art has first of all to do with honesty. My first lesson was to see objectively, to erase all 'meaning' of the thing seen. Then only, could the real meaning of it be understood and felt.”
Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) first seen 1969 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: p. unknown : 'Notes from 1969'