Quotations and Poems

» “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

» “Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.”
– A. Alvarez

» “Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.”
– Lindsay Anderson

» “Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.”
– Guillaume Apollinaire

» “Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature’s monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.”
– Guillaume Apollinaire

» “Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother’s womb.”
– Jean Arp

» “The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.”
– James Baldwin

» “Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.”
– J. G. Ballard

» “The first mistake of Art is to assume that it’s serious.”
– Lester Bangs

» “Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.”
– Daniel Barenboim

» “The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure”
– Mikhail Baryshnikov

» “Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.”
– Jacques Barzun

» “A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.”
– Charles Baudelaire

» “The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.”
– Charles Baudelaire

» “As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.”
– Stephen Bayley

» “In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.”
– Simone De Beauvoir

» “I’m the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don’t have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.”
– Beck

» “Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?”
– Ludwig Van Beethoven

» “No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.”
– Ludwig Van Beethoven

» “Any artist should be grateful for a naïve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.”
– Saul Bellow

» “As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn’t make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting — the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.”
– Saul Bellow

» “The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.”
– Walter Benjamin

» “I can’t tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.”
– John Berger

» “What is art but a way of seeing?”
– Thomas Berger

» “The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.”
– Adolf Berle

» “The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he’s in business.”
– John Berryman

» “The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.”
– Professor Blackie

» “The great artist is a slave to his ideals.”
– Christian Nevell Bovee

» “Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.”
– Elizabeth Bowen

» “The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.”
– Constantin Brancusi

» “The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.”
– Andre Breton

» “What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?”
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning

» “Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature’s chief masterpiece is writing well.”
– Duke of Buckingham

» “In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.”
– Luis Bunuel

» “Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don’t want it.”
– Anthony Burgess

» “Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.”
– William S. Burroughs

» “The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.”
– Samuel Butler

» “It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it –just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.”
– Albert Camus

» “To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.”
– Albert Camus

» “Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.”
– Al Capp

» “Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.”
– Angela Carter

» “Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.”
– Neal Cassady

» “Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”
– Willa Cather

» “Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”
– Willa Cather

» “With an apple I will astonish Paris.”
– Paul Cezanne

» “When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it — a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand — as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there’s a clash between the two, it is bad art.”
– Marc Chagall

» “When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.”
– Marc Chagall

» “The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.”
– Raymond Chandler

» “The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.”
– Gilbert K. Chesterton

» “The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.”
– Gilbert K. Chesterton

» “Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.”
– Gilbert K. Chesterton

» “Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.”
– Gilbert K. Chesterton

» “Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.”
– Winston Churchill

» “Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.”
– John Ciardi

» “One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.”
– Jean Cocteau

» “The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.”
– Cyril Connolly

» “The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.”
– Cyril Connolly

» “An artist is a man of action, whether he creates a personality, invents an expedient, or finds the issue of a complicated situation.”
– Joseph Conrad

» “Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.”
– Joseph Conrad

» “Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.”
– Charlotte Saunders Cushman

» “Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.”
– Edward Dahlberg

» “It is either easy or impossible.”
– Salvador Dali

» “There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.”
– Salvador Dali

» “This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.”
– Salvador Dali

» “Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.”
– Angela Y. Davis

» “Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.”
– Guy Debord

» “Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”
РEug̬ne Delacroix

» “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.”
– John Drummond

» “Art is the most passionate orgy within man’s grasp.”
– Jean Dubuffet

» “For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential –the imagination.”
– Lawrence Durrell

» “Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes –love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself –and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others –should we call it ”joy”?”
– Andrea Dworkin

» “The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness.”
– Max Eastman

» “Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.”
– T. S. Eliot

» “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
– T. S. Eliot

» “Every artist writes his own autobiography.”
– Havelock Ellis

» “Every artist was first an amateur.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “The arts and inventions of each period are only its costume, and do not invigorate men.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “The true poem is the poet’s mind.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “New arts destroy the old.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “Artists must be sacrificed to their art.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “Art is the path of the creator to his work.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing –to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson

» “Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.”
– Eliza Farnham

» “An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.”
– William Faulkner

» “The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist’s way of scribbling ”Kilroy was here” on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.”
– William Faulkner

» “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

» “I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.”
– Carrie Fisher

» “Art for art’s sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden… it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.”
– Edward M. Forster

» “In art as in love, instinct is enough.”
– Anatole France

» “One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape… it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.”
– Marilyn French

» “Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.”
– Northrop Frye

» “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.”
– Jose Ortega Y Gasset

» “Art is either plagiarism or revolution.”
– Paul Gauguin

» “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.”
– Henry Geldzahler

» “The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.”
– Andre Gide

» “Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.”
– Eric Gill

» “Fortunately art is a community effort –a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.”
– Allen Ginsberg

» “Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.”
– Jean-Luc Godard

» “Art is long, life short, judgment difficult, opportunity transient.”
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

» “One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.”
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

» “Personality is everything in art and poetry.”
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

» “The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.”
– Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

» “I can’t work without a model. I won’t say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.”
– Vincent Van Gogh

» “It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.”
– Vincent Van Gogh

» “As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.”
– Edmond and Jules De Goncourt

» “A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.”
– Edmond and Jules De Goncourt

» “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?”
– Nadine Gordimer

» “Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that’s hard for a puritan to understand.”
– Gunther Grass

» “There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.”
– Vaclav Havel

» “If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He’s not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he’s really needed.”
– David Hockney

» “A picture is a poem without words.”
– Horace

» “The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.”
– Aldous Huxley

» “The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you’re an artist.”
– Max Jacob

» “It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.”
– Henry James

» “Art has an enemy called ignorance.”
– Ben Johnson

» “I’m still an artist. I’m never gonna do a shit movie, because I’ve got my modeling to support me.”
– Milla Jovovich

» “Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.”
– James Joyce

» “Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.”
– Pauline Kael

» “I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. 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

» “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

» “In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.”
– John F. Kennedy

» “Art, that great undogmatized church.”
– Ellen Key

» “And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves ”It’s pretty, but is it Art?””
– Rudyard Kipling

» “Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible.”
– Paul Klee

» “The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.”
– Paul Klee

» “In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.”
– Willem De Kooning

» “Whatever an artist’s personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.”
– Willem De Kooning

» “An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.”
– Willem De Kooning

» “The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation.”
– Hilton Kramer

» “In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.”
– Louis Kronenberger

» “Art is the objectification of feeling.”
– Suzanne K. Langer

» “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.”
– Lao-Tzu

» “In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.”
– Sinclair Lewis

» “Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can’t force it.”
– Bella Lewitzky

» “Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother’s face, her aspect and her attitude.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

» “Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

» “The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.”
– Norman Mailer

» “There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.”
– Henri Matisse

» “Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.”
– Marshall Mcluhan

» “As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.”
– Marshall Mcluhan

» “Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.”
– Robert Menzies

» “Caricature is rough truth.”
– George Meredith

» “A man paints with his brains and not with his hands.”
– Michelangelo

» “The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.”
– Henry Miller

» “Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.”
– Henry Miller

» “Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.”
– Henry Miller

» “Art is man’s expression of his joy in labor.”
– William Morris

» “If I didn’t start painting, I would have raised chickens.”
– Grandma Moses

» “The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.”
– Robert Motherwell

» “Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.”
– Iris Murdoch

» “To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.”
– George Jean Nathan

» “We have art in order not to die of the truth.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

» “Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

» “Art raises its head where creeds relax.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche

» “The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.”
– Novalis

» “Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.”
– Novalis

» “There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.”
– Camille Paglia

» “Art is a form of catharsis.”
– Dorothy Parker

» “What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.”
– Octavio Paz

» “Wherever art appears, life disappears.”
– Francis Picabia

» “Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.”
– Pablo Picasso

» “We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.”
– Pablo Picasso

» “The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.”
– Pablo Picasso

» “If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.”
– Pablo Picasso

» “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.”
– Pablo Picasso

» “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth.”
– Pablo Picasso

» “Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.”
– Pablo Picasso

» “Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ”the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.” The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ”Artist.””
– Edgar Allan Poe

» “But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.”
– Ezra Pound

» “Good art however ”immoral” is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.”
– Ezra Pound

» “Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.”
– Ezra Pound

» “A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.”
– Marcel Proust

» “The perfection of art is to conceal art.”
– Edgar Quinet

» “Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man’s nature.”
– Ayn Rand

» “Art is too serious to be taken seriously.”
– Ad Reinhardt

» “He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]“
– Pierre Auguste Renoir

» “There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist’s relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.”
– Adrienne Rich

» “Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.”
– Laura Riding

» “Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.”
– Rainer Maria Rilke

» “I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don’t need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]“
– Auguste Rodin

» “Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause –it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.”
– Harold Rosenberg

» “What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?”
– Harold Rosenberg

» “Inside you there’s an artist you don’t know about. He’s not interested in how things look different in moonlight.”
– Jalal-Uddin Rumi

» “Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.”
– Salman Rushdie

» “No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.”
– John Ruskin

» “What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.”
– John Ruskin

» “I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”
– John Ruskin

» “Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.”
– George Sand

» “The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.”
– George Santayana

» “As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.”
– Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

» “The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.”
– Johann Friedrich Von Schiller

» “Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.”
– Robert Schumann

» “The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.”
– Robert Schumann

» “All art is an imitation of nature.”
– Seneca

» “The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]“
– William Shakespeare

» “O, had I but followed the arts!”
– William Shakespeare

» “Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.”
– George Bernard Shaw

» “Art is the signature of civilizations.”
– Beverly Sills

» “Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.”
– Alexander Solzhenitsyn

» “Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.”
– Susan Sontag

» “The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn’t make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.”
– Gertrude Stein

» “What is Art? It is the response of man’s creative soul to the call of the Real.”
– Rabindranath Tagore

» “Art — the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.”
– James Thurber

» “To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can’t eat it.”
– Count Leo Tolstoy

» “A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.”
– Lionel Trilling

» “All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.”
– Alexander Trocchi

» “If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
– Leon Trotsky

» “If that’s art, I’m a Hottentot!”
– Harry S. Truman

» “Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.”
– Kenneth Tynan

» “Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.”
– Tristan Tzara

» “Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.”
– Source Unknown

» “It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it’s a painting, and if you can walk around it it’s a sculpture.”
– Source Unknown

» “Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.”
– Source Unknown

» “Art… the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.”
– Source Unknown

» “Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There’s a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art”
– Source Unknown

» “Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.”
– John Updike

» “Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.”
– Edward Varese

» “The art of creation is older than the art of killing.”
– Andrei Voznesensky

» “An artist is somebody who produces things that people don’t need to have.”
– Andy Warhol

» “An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.”
– Evelyn Waugh

» “Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”
– Simone Weil

» “Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.”
– Rebecca West

» “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
– Alfred North Whitehead

» “No great artist ever sees things as they really are, if he did he would cease to be an artist.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “In a very ugly and sensible age, the arts borrow, not from life, but from each other.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “Bad art is a great deal worse than no art at all.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “Bad artists always admire each other’s work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One”
– Oscar Wilde

» “All art is quite useless.”
– Oscar Wilde

» “The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it’s dead for you.”
– Robert Wilson

» “The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.”
– Winkelmann

» “The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.”
– Thomas Wolfe

» “This is the artist, then, life’s hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty’s miser, glory’s slave.”
– Thomas Wolfe

» “It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.”
– George E. Woodberry

» “Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?”
– William Wordsworth

» “Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.”
– Frank Lloyd Wright

» “Art for art’s sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.”
– Yu Cao

» “There is in fact no such thing as art for art’s sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.”
– Mao Zedong

» “I am an artist… I am here to live out loud.”
– Emile Zola