Quotes and Sayings About Art
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A world without poetry and art would be too much like one without birds or flowers: bearable but a lot less enjoyable.
-- Aberjhani -
Why dost thou heap up wealth, which thou must quit, Or what is worse, be left by it? Why dost thou load thyself when thou 'rt to fly, Oh, man! ordain'd to die? Why dost thou build up stately rooms on high, Thou who art under ground to lie? Thou sow'st and plantest, but no fruit must see, For death, alas! is reaping thee.
-- Abraham Cowley -
"We may talk what we please," he cries in his enthusiasm for the oldest of the arts, "of lilies, and lions rampant, and spread eagles, in fields d'or or d'argent; but, if heraldry were guided by reason, a plough in a field arable would be the most noble and ancient arms."
-- Abraham Cowley -
Curs'd be that wretch (Death's factor sure) who brought Dire swords into the peaceful world, and taught Smiths (who before could only make The spade, the plough-share, and the rake) Arts, in most cruel wise Man's left to epitomize!
-- Abraham Cowley -
Remember that there is meaning beyond absurdity. Know that every deed counts, that every word is power...Above all, remember that you must build your life as if it were a work of art.
-- Abraham Joshua Heschel -
There is no specialized art of prayer. All of life must be a training to pray. We pray the way we live.
-- Abraham Joshua Heschel -
Whatever man may stand, whatever he may do, to whatever he may apply his hand - in agriculture, in commerce, and in industry, or his mind, in the world of art, and science - he is, in whatsoever it may be, constantly standing before the face of God. He is employed in the service of his God. He has strictly to obey his God. And above all, he has to aim at the glory of his God.
-- Abraham Kuyper -
The motive of art comes to us not from what exists, but from the notion that there is something higher, something nobler, something richer, and that what exists corresponds only partially to all of this.
-- Abraham Kuyper -
Unchecked, the dominating influences of money and of barren intellectualism would reduce the life of emotions to freezing point. And, unable to grasp the holier benefits of religion, the mysticism of the heart reacts in the art-intoxication. .... In this cold, irreligious and practical age the warmth of this devotion to art has kept alive many higher aspirations of our soul, which otherwise might readily have died, as they did in the middle of the last century.
-- Abraham Kuyper -
The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
The greatest fine art of the future will be the making of a comfortable living from a small piece of land.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world...enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and space.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
I have never studied the art of paying compliments to women; but I must say that if all that has been said by orators and poets since the creation of the world in praise of women were applied to the women of America, it would not do them justice for their conduct during this war.
-- Abraham Lincoln -
Some reckon their age by years, Some measure their life by art; But some tell their days by the flow of their tears And their lives by the moans of their hearts.
-- Abram Joseph Ryan -
I remember my emotions the day we watched Nelson Mandela walk out of prison Writing & literature in South Africa during the anti-apartheid years, became a 'cultural weapon.' You had to use it to fight apartheid & some of us resisted that in the end, you recognize that you are facing a government that has no scruples about using culture & art to oppress you.
-- Achmat Dangor -
Art is art. Everything else is everything else.
-- Ad Reinhardt -
The ugliest spectacle is that of artists selling themselves. Art as a commodity is an ugly idea... The artist as businessman is uglier than the businessman as artist.
-- Ad Reinhardt -
The job at Brooklyn is interesting because Brooklyn reflects what happened to university art departments everywhere. It might be the worst department now, and yet at one point it was the best in the country.
-- Ad Reinhardt -
I taught a lot of art history, especially Chinese, Japanese, and Indian. But the painting classes came back. The nudes came back. Not so much the still lifes. So now our department is the worst department, partly because it has the worst facilities.
-- Ad Reinhardt -
An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.
-- Ad Reinhardt -
The one object of fifty years of abstract art is to present art-as-art and as nothing else, to make it into the one thing it is only, separating and defining it more and more, making it purer and emptier, more absolute and more exclusive - non-objective, non-representational, non-figurative, non-imagist, non-expressionist, non-subjective. the only and one way to say what abstract art or art-as-art is, is to say what it is not.
-- Ad Reinhardt -
I like the idea of the museum world and the university-academic situation where artists talk to each other or where artists or art students study with artists.
-- Ad Reinhardt -
Today, when so much seems to conspire to reduce life and feeling to the most deprived and demeaning bottom line, it is more important than ever that we receive that extra dimension of dignity or delight and the elevated sense of self that the art of building can provide through the nature of the places where we live and work. What counts more than style is whether architecture improves our experience of the built world; whether it makes us wonder why we never noticed places in quite this way before.
-- Ada Louise Huxtable -
Beauty or beast, the modern skyscraper is a major force with a strong magnetic field. It draws into its physical being all of the factors that propel and characterize modern civilization. The skyscraper is the point where art and the city meet.
-- Ada Louise Huxtable -
Every age cuts and pastes history to suit its own purposes; art always has an ax to grind.
-- Ada Louise Huxtable -
The perennial architectural debate has always been, and will continue to be, about art versus use, visions versus pragmatism, aesthetics versus social responsibility. In the end, these unavoidable conflicts provide architecture's essential and productive tensions; the tragedy is that so little of it rises above the level imposed by compromise, and that this is the only work most of us see and know.
-- Ada Louise Huxtable -
In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city's aniquated support systems, circulation, and infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. ... Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.
-- Ada Louise Huxtable -
The art of decoration requires the most sophisticated and self-indulgent skills. Its aim has always been to sate the senses as gloriously as possible. ... ornament is not only a source of sensuous pleasure; it supplies a necessary kind of magic to people and places that lack it. More than just a dread of empty spaces has led to the urge to decorate; it is the fear of empty selves.
-- Ada Louise Huxtable
