Skip to content

Art Quotes

Artists themselves fill the top places, which is unusual. Monet leads, then Erich Fromm, Renoir, John Galsworthy and Berthe Morisot, so the page has a lot of painters talking about painting. For the theory side, Tolstoy’s What Is Art? (1897) calls art a human activity whose purpose is to transmit the highest and best feelings to others, and Camus, in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), says that if the world were clear, art would not exist.

“I dream my painting, and then I paint my dream” is credited to Vincent van Gogh and flagged misattributed. The notes list early versions: a French form, “Je rêve mon tableau, et plus tard je peindrai mon rêve,” cited in a 1918 book, and English translations in the Musical Courier of 1908.

Random quote on Art

Most quoted on art:

Art is anything you can do well. Anything you can do with Quality.

Robert M. Pirsig NPR Interview with Pirsig (1974)

All art is propaganda. It is universally and inescapably propaganda; sometimes unconsciously, but often deliberately, propaganda.

Upton Sinclair Mammonart - an Essay in Economic Interpretation Ch. 2 Who Owns the Artists? (1925)

In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.

Béla Bartók The Enjoyment of Music : An Introduction to Perceptive Listening‎ (1955)

What is fair in men, passes away, but not so in art.

Leonardo da Vinci The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)

Propaganda of sufficient age became art.

Gregory Benford Beyond Infinity (2004)

The production of a work of art is determined by the material and intellectual climate in which a man lives and dies.

Hippolyte Taine Philosophy of Art (1865)

If you don’t call it art, you’re likely to get a better result.

Brian Eno A Year With Swollen Appendices (1996)

Novels are long-term relationships, and short stories are flings. In art, as with life, I always opted for relationships.

Malcolm Azania E-Force (2012)

The real pioneers in ideas, in art and in literature have remained aliens to their time, misunderstood and repudiated.

Emma Goldman Intellectual Proletarians (1914)

All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn't your pet — it's your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.

Joss Whedon

Art hath an enemy call'd ignorance.

Ben Jonson Every Man out of His Humour (1598)

As for what l'm making now, perhaps it's art; but if it isn't, at least it's something else equally interesting to me!

George Rickey Selden Rodman (1957)

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Society and Solitude (1870)

Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.

Albert Camus The Rebel (1951)

Sound unbound by nature becomes bounded by art.

Dejan Stojanovic

All art is the expression of experience in some medium.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

I had, at the time, an irrational, Luddite inclination that there was something morally bankrupt about making art with a computer.

Jeffrey Ford

The place displayed luxury without comfort, ostentation without art. I hated it.

Sheri S. Tepper The Margarets (2007)

Be sure from nature never to depart;
To copy nature is the task of art.
The noblest poets own her sovereign sway,
And ever follow where she leads the way.

Christopher Pitt Vida's Art of Poetry (1725)

Art matters not merely because it is the most magnificent ornament and the most nearly unfailing occupation of our lives, but because it is life itself.

Randall Jarrell Poetry and the Age (1953)

Related topics