Maxwell Anderson ~ “If you practice an art, be proud of it and make it proud of you. It may break your heart, but it will fill your heart before it breaks it; it will make you a person in your own right.”
Ethel Barrymore ~ “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.”
Jacques Barzun ~ “Art distills sensation and embodies it with enhanced meaning in a memorable form - or else it is not art.”
Simone de Beauvoir ~ “Art is an attempt to integrate evil.”
Saul Bellow ~ “What is art but a way of seeing?”
“Any artist should be grateful for a naive grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.”
Jean Cocteau ~ “Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.”
Dante ~ “Nature is the art of God.”
Isak Dinesen ~ “A great artist is never poor.”
Theodore Dreiser ~ “Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.”
Loren Eiseley ~ “It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man.”
Marsilio Ficino ~ “Artists in each of the arts seek after and care for nothing but love.”
Helen Frankenthaler ~ “There are no rules. That is how art is born, how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules. That is what invention is about.”
André Gide ~ “Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.”
Arshile Gorky ~ “Drawing is the basis of art. A bad painter cannot draw. But one who draws well can always paint.”
“Art must always remain earnest... Art must be serious, no sarcasm, comedy. One does not laugh at a loved one.”
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.”
“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?”
Adolph Gottlieb ~ “When I was a boy studying art I became aware of and accepted the difficulties of the modern artist. By the age of 18 I clearly understood that the artist in our society cannot expect to make a living from art; must live in the midst of a hostile environment; cannot communicate through his art with more than a few people; and if his work is significant, cannot achieve recognition until the end of his life, if he is lucky, and more likely posthumously.”
Robert Henri ~ “Art cannot be separated from life. It is the expression of the greatest need of which life is capable, and we value art not because of the skilled product, but because of its revelation of a life's experience.”
“It is harder to see than it is to express. The whole value of art rests in the artist's ability to see well into what is before him.”
Horace ~ “A picture is a poem without words.”
Elbert Hubbard ~ “Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Science is the effective way of doing things. Business is the economic way of doing things.”
Friedensreich Hundertwasser ~ “Visual pollution is more poisonous than any other pollution because it kills the soul.”
James Weldon Johnson ~ “The final measure of the greatness of all peoples is the amount and standard of the literature and all they have produced. The world does not know that a people is great until that people produces great literature and art.”
Ben Jonson ~ “Art hath an enemy called ignorance.”
Barbara Jordan ~ “Art has the potential to unify. It can speak in many languages without a translator. Art does not discriminate - it ignores external irrelevancies and opts for quality, talent and competence.” 1993
Jerzy Kosinski ~ “The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.”
Willem de Kooning ~ “The attitude that nature is chaotic and that the artist puts order into it is a very absurd point of view, I think. All that we can hope for is to put some order into ourselves.”
Madeleine L'Engle ~ “Our truest responsibility to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find the truth.”
Norman Mailer ~ “The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.”
Marshall McLuhan ~ “Artists in various fields are always the first to discover how to enable one medium or to release the power of another.”
“The artist is the person who invents the means to bridge between biological inheritance and the environments created by technological innovation.”
Henry Miller ~ “An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.”
Piet Mondrian ~ “The unconscious in us warns us that in art we have to follow one particular path. And if we follow it, it is not the sign of an unconscious act. On the contrary, it shows that there is in our ordinary consciousness a greater awareness of our unconsciousness.”
Robert Motherwell ~ “The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.”
“Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.”
Louise Nevelson ~ “I think most artists create out of despair. The very nature of creation is not a performing glory on the outside, it's a painful, difficult search within.”
Barnett Newman ~ “Any art worthy of its name should address ‘life’, ‘man’, ‘nature’, ‘death’ and ‘tragedy’.”
Emil Nolte ~ “There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. Every color holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him, colors are colors, tones tones ... and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed.”
Novalis ~ “Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.”
Giacomo Puccini ~ “Inspiration is an awakening, a quickening of all man's faculties, and it is manifested in all high artistic achievements.”
Otto Rank ~ “Art is life's dream interpretation.”
Rainer Maria Rilke ~ “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.”
Rabindranath Tagore ~ “What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.”
George Sand ~ “The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.”
George Santayana ~ “An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”
Friedrich Schiller ~ “Art is the daughter of freedom.”
Alexander Solzhenitsyn ~ “The one and only substitute for experience which we have not ourselves had is art, literature.”
Miguel de Unamuno ~ “Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.”
Evelyn Waugh ~ “Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.”
Alfred North Whitehead ~ “Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.”
“Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.”
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