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, American writer
Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don’t believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art’s sake.
E. M. Forster, English writer
What we play is life.
Louis Armstrong, American musician
Art is the signature of civilizations.
Beverly Sills, American singer
Art is skill; that is the first meaning of the word.
Eric Gill, English sculptor
Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure
of the mind which searches into nature
and which there divines the spirit of
which Nature herself is animated.
Auguste Rodin, French sculptor
I believe it is impossible to make sense of
life in this world except through art.
Daniel Pinkwater, American illustrator
What is real is not the external form, but
the essence of things … it is impossible
for anyone to express anything essentially
real by imitating its exterior surface.
Constantin Brâncus¸i, Romanian sculptor
The function of Art is to disturb.
Georges Braque, French painter and sculptor
Art is essentially the affirmation, the
blessing, and the deification of existence.
Friedrich Nietzsche, German writer
Without art, the crudeness of reality
would make the world unbearable.
George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright
Henry Miller, American playwright
You use a glass mirror to see your face;
you use works of art to see your soul.
George Bernard Shaw, Irish playwright
Art is much less important than life,
but what a poor life without it.
Robert Motherwell, American painter
Wherever art appears, life disappears.
Robert Motherwell, American painter
Art is the Queen of all sciences, communicating
knowledge to all the generations of the world.
Leonardo da Vinci, Italian artist
Art should reveal the unknown, to those
who lack the experience of seeing it.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Native American artist
The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint … I’d like to pretend that I’ve never seen anything, never read anything, never heard anything
… and then make something … Every time I make something, I think about the people who are going to see it and every time I see something, I think about the person who made it … Nothing is important … so everything is important.
Keith Haring, American artist
Art evokes the mystery without which the
world would not exist.
René Magritte, Belgian artist
Good art is not what it looks like,
but what it does to us.
Roy Adzak, English photographer and sculptor
Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms.
Roy Lichtenstein, American artist
There is one thing one has to have: either a
soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made
cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.
Friedrich Nietzsche, German writer
Art is what delineates the technically correct
dancer from the dancer who has skill and passion!
Curtis Verdun, American painter
Never lose an opportunity of seeing anything
beautiful, for beauty is God’s handwriting.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American writer
I want to touch people with my art. I want them
to say “he feels deeply; he feels tenderly.”
Vincent van Gogh, Dutch painter
Art is the child of imagination and gives life.
Mirka Mora, Australian artist
The true work of art is but a shadow
of the divine perfection.
Michelangelo, Italian artist
The more horrifying this world becomes,
the more art becomes abstract.
Paul Klee, German and Swiss painter
Art enables us to find ourselves and
lose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton, American writer
As a suffering creature, I cannot do without
something greater than I—something
that is my life—the power to create.
Vincent van Gogh, Dutch painter
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Russian writer
We have art in order not to die of life.
Albert Camus, French writer
It may be that the deep necessity of art
is the examination of self-deception.
Robert Motherwell, American painter
Art washes from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Pablo Picasso, Spanish artist
Art is the closest thing to running
away, without ever leaving home.
Twyla Tharp, American dancer and choreographer
If we, citizens, do not support our artists,
then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar
of crude reality and we end up believing in
nothing and having worthless dreams.
Yann Martel, Canadian writer
My soul can find no staircase to heaven
unless it be through Earth’s loveliness.
Michelangelo, Italian artist
A person’s life purpose is nothing more than to rediscover, through the detours of art, or love, or passionate work, those one or two images in the presence of which his heart first opened.
Albert Camus, French writer
Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.
James G. Huneker, American writer and critic
Art does not reproduce the visible;
rather, it makes visible.
Paul Klee, German and Swiss painter
There is no must in art because art is free.
Wassily Kandinsky, Russian painter
To become truly immortal, a work of art must escape all human limits: logic and common sense will only interfere. But once these barriers are broken, it will enter the realms of childhood visions and dreams.
Giorgio de Chirico, Greek-born Italian artist
What is one to think of those fools who tell
one that the artist is always subordinate to
nature? Art is a harmony parallel with nature.
Paul Cézanne, French artist
To make us feel small in the right way
is a function of art; men can only make
us feel small in the wrong way.
E. M. Forster, English writer
Art is the stored honey of the human soul,
gathered on wings of misery and travail.
Theodore Dreiser, American writer
Stella Adler, American actress
What art offers is space—a certain
breathing room for the spirit.
John Updike, American writer
For me, painting is a way to forget life. It
is a cry in the night, a strangled laugh.
Georges Rouault, French painter
There is no surer method of evading the
world than by following Art, and no surer
method of linking oneself to it than by Art.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, German writer, artist, and politician
Art is the triumph over chaos.
John Cheever, American writer
Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life.
Jean Paul, German writer
Art is like a border of flowers along
the course of civilization.
Lincoln Steffens, American writer
Art is not a thing; it is a way.
Elbert Hubbard, American writer
The aim of art is to represent not
the outward appearance of things,
but their inward significance.
Aristotle, ancient Greek writer and philosopher
Art is man’s constant effort to create
for himself a different order of reality
from that which is given to him.
Chinua Achebe, Nigerian writer
I think of art as a glue, a cultural and social glue. It’s one of the means that has served to show us the things we believe in and the things we celebrate; it has served to reinforce our relationship to each other.
Eric Fischl, American artist
Art completes what nature cannot
bring to finish. The artist gives us
knowledge of nature’s unrealized ends.
Aristotle, ancient Greek writer and philosopher
Art is our chief means of breaking
bread with the dead.
W. H. Auden, Anglo-American poet
What is art? Nature concentrated.
Honoré de Balzac, French writer
Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic.
Daniel Bell, American writer
Art is who we are. It facilitates self-
realization in everyone.
Philippe Benichou, French-American artist
Art is a guarantee of sanity. That is the
most important thing I have said.
Louise Bourgeois, French-American artist
Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but
a hammer with which to shape it.
Bertolt Brecht, German poet and playwright
Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.
Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton, English politician and writer
True art is undeniable, and it is
a gift for all humanity.
Charles Philip Brooks, American painter
I once had the nerve to ask Picasso the
question, “What is art?” He answered, “Art
is a lie which makes us see the truth.”
James Dickey, American poet
Art is a language that can transcend
words. It can convey some of the nonverbal
consciousness of the artist to the viewer.
Ron Gang, Israeli artist
Remy de Gourmont, French writer
Art is a step from what is obvious and well
known toward what is arcane and concealed.
Kahlil Gibran, Lebanese-American writer and artist
Art is a staple of mankind … so urgent, so
utterly linked with the pulse of feeling that
it becomes the singular sign of life when
every other aspect of civilization fails.
Jamake Highwater, American writer
Art is one of the means whereby man seeks
to redeem a life which is experienced as
chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.
Aldous Huxley, English writer
Art is love.
William Holman Hunt, English painter
Art is the only clean thing on
earth, except holiness.
Joris-Karl Huysmans, French novelist
Art is the human disposition of sensible or
intelligible matter for an aesthetic end.
James Joyce, Irish writer
Art is a line around your thoughts.
Gustav Klimt, Austrian painter
Art is our one true global language. It knows no nation; it favors no race; and it acknowledges no class. It speaks to our need to reveal, heal, and transform. It transcends our ordinary lives and lets us imagine what is possible.
Richard Kamler, American artist
Art is an action against death.
It is a denial of death.
Jacques Lipchitz, Lithuanian sculptor
Art is the child of Nature.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American poet
André Malraux, French writer
Art is not made for anybody and is,
at the same time, for everybody.
Piet Mondrian, Dutch painter
We have art so that we may
not perish by the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche, German writer
Art is the journey of a free soul.
Alev Oguz, Turkish artist
Art is the demonstration that the
ordinary is extraordinary.
Amédée Ozenfant, French painter
Art comes to you proposing frankly to
give nothing but the highest quality
to your moments as they pass.
Walter Pater, English writer
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves
and know what another person sees.
Marcel Proust, French writer
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, English-Indian writer