ART QUOTES VI

quotations about art

Art quote

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Perhaps art is a quest for the perfect, or even the imperfect. Reality always falls short on both sides.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH
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Letters to a Young Artist


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Tags: Anna Deavere Smith, perfection


All art that is not mere storytelling, or mere portraiture, is symbolic, and has the purpose of those symbolic talismans which medieval magicians made with complex colours and forms, and bade their patients ponder over daily, and guard with holy secrecy; for it entangles, in complex colours and forms, a part of the Divine Essence.

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Ideas of Good and Evil


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Tags: William Butler Yeats


Never judge a work of art by its defects.

WASHINGTON ALLSTON

attributed, A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern


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Tags: Washington Allston


Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

TONI MORRISON

Sula


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Tags: Toni Morrison, artists


The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

NORMAN MAILER

Western Review, winter 1959


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Tags: Norman Mailer, morality


The arts are not just a nice thing to have or to do if there is free time or if one can afford it. Rather, paintings and poetry, music and fashion, design and dialogue, they all define who we are as a people and provide an account of our history for the next generation.

MICHELLE OBAMA

remarks at the ribbon cutting ceremony for the Metropolitan Museum of Art American Wing, May 18, 2009


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Tags: Michelle Obama, history


I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us. We don't have to rely totally on experience if we can do things in our imagination.... It's the only way in which you can live more lives than your own. You can escape your own time, your own sensibility, your own narrowness of vision.

MARY OLIVER

The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 9, 1992


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Tags: Mary Oliver, imagination


Art without emotion is like chocolate cake without sugar. It makes you gag.

LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON

Speak


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Tags: emotion


When Nature begins to reveal her open secret to a man, he feels an irresistible longing for her worthiest interpreter, Art.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe


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Tags: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, nature


True art, like nature, ever bears
Suggestions of some higher thing;
As more than form or tint of bird
We prize the song he stops to sing.

EDITH WILLIS LINN FORBES

"A Landscape in Oils"


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Art is the method of levitation, in order to separate one's self from enslavement by the earth.

ANAIS NIN

The Journals of Anais Nin


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Tags: Anais Nin


I have never found anywhere, in the domain of art, that you don't have to walk to. (There is quite an array of jets, buses and hacks which you can ride to Success; but that is a different destination.) It is a pretty wild country. There are, of course, roads. Great artists make the roads; good teachers and good companions can point them out. But there ain't no free rides, baby. No hitchhiking. And if you want to strike out in any new direction -- you go alone. With a machete in your hand and the fear of God in your heart.

URSULA K. LE GUIN

The Language of the Night


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Tags: Ursula K. Le Guin


I feel that art has something to do with the achievement of stillness in the midst of chaos. A stillness that characterizes prayer, too, and the eye of the storm.

SAUL BELLOW

The Paris Review, winter 1966


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Tags: Saul Bellow, chaos


But art not only exploits the variety of appearances, it also affirms the validity of individual outlook and thereby admits a further dimension of variety. Since the shapes of art do not primarily bear witness to the objective nature of the things for which they stand, they can reflect individual interpretation and invention.

RUDOLF ARNHEIM

Visual Thinking


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There is no logical reason why the camel of great art should pass through the needle of mob intelligence.

REBECCA WEST

The Strange Necessity


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Tags: Rebecca West, mobs


I always wanted to show the world that art is everywhere, except it has to pass through a creative mind.

LOUISE NEVELSON

"Dawns and Dusks", Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings


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Tags: creativity, mind


Every artist joins a conversation that's been going on for generations, even millennia, before he or she joins the scene.

JOHN BARTH

attributed, Writers Dreaming


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I start a picture and I finish it. I don't think about art while I work. I try to think about life.

JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT

"Riding with Death: The Final Years", Jean-Michel Basquiat: 1960-1988


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Tags: life


An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

JEAN COCTEAU

Newsweek, May 16, 1955


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Tags: Jean Cocteau, artists


When I reflect that the task which the artist implicitly sets himself is to overthrow existing values, to make of the chaos about him an order which is his own, to sow strife and ferment so that by the emotional release those who are dead may be restored to life, then it is that I run with joy to the great and imperfect ones, their confusion nourishes me, their stuttering is like divine music to my ears.

HENRY MILLER

Tropic of Cancer


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Tags: Henry Miller, chaos