art quotes

Andrew Kuntz: 

I find working with glass meditative, almost therapeutic. I can leave the world behind, and focus... The simplicity of form, the drama of rich, intense colour, the joy of challenge, and the challenge of endurance... The piece, when it is over, is not what is made, but how it is made.

Benjamin Constant: 

Art for art's sake, with no purpose, for any purpose perverts art. But art achieves a purpose which is not its own. [1804]

Carl Jung: 

Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

Daniel Barenboim: 

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Denise Levertov: 

I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

Elizabeth Murray: 

Gardening is the art that uses flowers and plants as paint, and the soil and sky as canvas.

Ezra Pound: 

Good art can not be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Goethe: 

Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.

Helen M. Winslow: 

Women, poets, and especially artists, like cats; delicate natures only can realize their sensitive nervous systems.

Jean de La Bruyère: 

There are certain things in which mediocrity is intolerable: poetry, music, painting, public eloquence. What torture it is to hear a frigid speech being pompously declaimed, or second-rate verse spoken with all a bad poet's bombast!

John Adams: 

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

Joseph Campbell: 

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

Julia Cameron: 

Art is not about thinking something up. It is the opposite -- getting something down.
The Artist's Way


Leonytne Price: 

Art is the only thing you cannot punch a button for. You must do it the old-fashioned way. Stay up and really burn the midnight oil. There are no compromises.

Magdalena Abakanowicz: 

Art will remain the most astonishing activity of mankind born out of struggle between wisdom and madness, between dream and reality in our mind.

Magdalena Abakanowicz: 

Art does not solve problems but makes us aware of their existence. It opens our eyes to see and our brain to imagine.

Oscar Levant: 

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.

Pablo Picasso: 

My mother said to me, "If you become a soldier, you'll be a general; if you become a monk, you'll end up as the Pope." Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.

Pablo Picasso: 

All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once he grows up.

Ralph Sockman: 

Christmas renews our youth by stirring our wonder. The capacity for wonder has been called our most pregnant human faculty, for in it are born our art, our science, our religion.

Richard Avedon: 

There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

Rita Mae Brown: 

Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.

Rollo May: 

Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations, the latter (like the river banks) forcing the spontaneity into the various forms which are essential to the work of art or poem.

Sir Walter Scott: 

Nothing is more the child of art than a garden.

Theodore Adorno: 

A successful work of art is not one which resolves contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure.

Thomas Moore: 

The many great gardens of the world, of literature and poetry, of painting and music, of religion and architecture, all make the point as clear as possible: The soul cannot thrive in the absence of a garden. If you don't want paradise, you are not human; and if you are not human, you don't have a soul.

Vita Sackville-West: 

Every garden-maker should be an artist along his own lines. That is the only possible way to create a garden, irespective of size or wealth.

William S. Burroughs: 

Nothing exists until or unless it is observed. An artist is making something exist by observing it. And his hope for other people is that they will also make it exist by observing it. I call it "creative observation." Creative viewing.

William Wordsworth: 

Laying out grounds may be considered a liberal art, in some sort like poetry and painting.