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Quotations by Subject: Art
(Related Subjects: Writing, Poetry, Music, Criticism)
Showing quotations 21 to 50 of 81 quotations in our collections

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.: Edith Wharton (1862 - 1937)
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 (1862 - 1937)
A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.: Edmond de Goncourt (1822 - 1896)
It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.: Elizabeth Aston, The True Darcy Spirit, 2006
Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.: Elizabeth Bowen (1899 - 1973)
Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.: Eugene Delacroix (1798 - 1863)
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 (1920 - 1993)
Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.: Frank Zappa (1940 - 1993)
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 (1907 - 1954)
Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.: G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936)
Without art the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.: George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), Back to Methuselah, 1921
Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.: George Tooker
What I dream of is an art of balance.: Henri Matisse (1869 - 1954), O Magazine, April 2003
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.: Henry Ward Beecher (1813 - 1887), Proverbs from Plymouth Pulpit, 1887
The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explination.: Hilton Kramer, The New York Times art critic, in the late 1960
Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.: Isak Dineson, 'Babette's Feast'
The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.: Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956)
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, Chasing Windmills, 07-11-2006
It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.: Jeff Melvoin, Northern Exposure, Fish Story, 1994
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, Northern Exposure, Fish Story, 1994
There is no better deliverance from the world than through art; and a man can form no surer bond with it than through art.: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832), Elective Affinities
If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.: John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963), Speech at Amherst College, October 26, 1963
We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.: John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963), October 26, 1963
The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness.: John Green, The Fault in Our Stars, 2012
Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.: John Singer Sargent (1856 - 1925), quoted in Bentley and Esar, Treasury of Humorous Quotations (1951)
To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.: Joseph Chilton Pearce
Our creations MUST be shared to be art, and the easiest way to share our art is to sell it.: Laura Moncur (1969 - ), Merriton: 35 Minutes from Home, 03-07-12
What we play is life.: Louis Armstrong (1900 - 1971)
The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.: Louis I Kahn
All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.: M. C. Richards

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