Art famous quotes
Last updated: Jul 22, 2024
-
Art is one of the means whereby man seeks to redeem a life which is experienced as chaotic, senseless, and largely evil.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Abused as we abuse it at present, dramatic art is in no sense cathartic; it is merely a form of emotional masturbation...
-- Aldous Huxley -
Since Mozart's day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.
-- Aldous Huxley -
‎"But that's the price we have to pay for stability. You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art. We've sacrificed the high art.
-- Aldous Huxley -
-
It isn’t only art that is incompatible with happiness, it’s also science. Science is dangerous, we have to keep it most carefully chained and muzzled.
-- Aldous Huxley -
Magick is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.
-- Aleister Crowley -
Indubitably, magic is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgment and practice than in any other branch of physics.
-- Aleister Crowley -
If art is not a medicine for the society, it is a poison.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky -
-
I have an ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition. Why you will not have ambition? Why? Have the greatest ambition possible. You want to be immortal? Fight to be immortal. Do it. You want to make the most fantastic art or movie? Try. If you fail, is not important. We need to try.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky -
I live making comics. Comics is an industrial art but less suffering, because comics are for young people who are more adventurous. I do that. I live off comics, and then I write books, but when you want movies, you cannot make movies without money.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky -
I am an artist, you understand? For me, a picture is like poetry. When you make art, this is not coming from an intellectual place. It's coming from the deep side of your unconscious, your soul.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky -
-
I think the art of filmmaking is something you learn through actions, by doing it, not by learning theories. And as you do it, your mind starts to change.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky -
I am not a commercial industry creator. I don't believe in making art to make money.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky -
Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words…By means of art were are sometimes sent - dimly, briefly - revelations unattainable by reason.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
-
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
This deliberately nurtured hatred then spreads to all that is alive, to life itself, to the world with its colors, sounds, and shapes, to the human body. The embittered art of the twentieth century is perishing as a result of this ugly hate, for art is fruitless without love. In the East art has collapsed because it has been knocked down and trampled upon, but in the West the fall has been voluntary, a decline into a contrived and pretentious quest where the artist, instead of attempting to reveal the divine plan, tries to put himself in the place of God.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
Who has the skill to make a narrow, obstinate human being aware of others' far-off grief and joy, to make him understand dimensions and delusions he himself has never lived through? Propaganda, coercion, and scientific proofs are powerless. But happily, in our world there is a way. It is art, and it is literature.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
-
Too much art was no art at all. Like candy instead of bread!
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
The task of the artist is to sense more keenly than others the harmony of the world, the beauty and the outrage of what man has done to it, and poignantly to let people know.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art-and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
Who will dare say he has defined art?
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
-
Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom while discouragement often nips it at the bud. Creativity is now something we can turn on and off like a faucet. It is an experience and expression in our lives that must be nurtured. This nurturing process means that creativity is at once a skill, an art, and a life-style.
-- Alex Faickney Osborn -
The purpose of truly transcendent art is to express something you are not yet, but something that you can become.
-- Alex Grey -
When artists give form to revelation, their art can advance, deepen and potentially transform the consciousness of their community.
-- Alex Grey -
Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.
-- Alex Grey -
-
I think that that's why artists make art - it is difficult to put into words unless you are a poet. What it takes is being open to the flow of universal creativity. The Zen artists knew this.
-- Alex Grey -
The artist's mission is to make the soul perceptible. Our scientific, materialist culture trains us to develop the eyes of outer perception. Visionary art encourages the development of our inner sight. To find the visionary realm, we use the intuitive inner eye: the eye of contemplation, the eye of the soul. All the inspiring ideas we have as artists originate here.
-- Alex Grey -
I didn't have any qualms. I'm used to taking my clothes off in front of strangers. I've done it since I was 14 - with my mother's adult education art classes. She liked to paint and I went along as a life model.
-- Alex Kingston -
-
I think it started since I was born, I always had a need to express myself, you know, as a human being, and I found that it felt right when I expressed myself through art, dance, through acting, so it kind of happened naturally.
-- Alex Meraz -
The United States and Turkey are the only two countries that don't have some kind of subsidy for the Arts. The whole culture in society has made certain films more acceptable. I turned down so many films in the '60s and '70s.
-- Alex North -
Fear is a problem with film music and films; people want to be conventional, and there's more commercialism today. If you are not daring in your art, you're bankrupt.
-- Alex North -
I decided honestly that comic art is an art form in itself. It reflects the life and times more accurately and actually is more artistic than magazine illustration - since it is entirely creative. An illustrator works with camera and models; a comic artist begins with a white sheet of paper and dreams up his own business - he is playwright, director, editor and artist at once.
-- Alex Raymond -
-
After all, what more does a true genius want? The mind itself is the palace where all the real treasures, the works of art, the indulgences exist.
-- Alex Scarrow -
Capitalists work hard to produce what consumers want. Artists who work too hard to produce what consumers want are often accused of selling out. Thus, even the languages of capitalism and art conflict: a firm that has 'sold out' has succeeded, but an artist that has 'sold out' has failed.
-- Alex Tabarrok -
I consider chess an art, and accept all those responsibilities which art places upon its devotees.
-- Alexander Alekhine -
Chess for me is not a game, but an art. Yes, and I take upon myself all those responsibilities which an art imposes on its adherents.
-- Alexander Alekhine -
-
For success I consider three factors are necessary: firstly, an awareness of my own strengths and weaknesses; secondly, an accurate understanding of my opponent's strengths and weaknesses; thirdly, a higher aim than momentary satisfaction. I see this aim as being scientific and artistic achievements, which place the game of chess on a par with other arts.
-- Alexander Alekhine -
What art thou, life, that we, must court thy stay? A breath one single gasp must puff away! A short-lived flower, that with the day must fade! A fleeting vapor, and an empty shade! A stream that silently but swiftly glides To meet eternity's immeasured tides! A being, lost alike by pain or joy? A fly can kill it, or a worm destroy! Impair'd by labor, and by ease undone, Commenced in tears, and ended in a groan.
-- Alexander Brome -
Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions.
-- Alexander Calder -
To an engineer, good enough means perfect. With an artist, there's no such thing as perfect.
-- Alexander Calder -
-
To most people who look at a mobile, it's no more than a series of flat objects that move. To a few, though, it may be poetry.
-- Alexander Calder -
Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.
-- Alexander Calder -
My fingers always seem busier than my mind.
-- Alexander Calder -
-
The underlying sense of form in my work has been the system of the Universe, or part thereof. For that is a rather large model to work from.
-- Alexander Calder -
My whole theory about art is the disparity that exists between form, masses and movement.
-- Alexander Calder -
Art is only art if it is synonymous with living
-- Alexander Girard -
The magician depends for the success of his art upon the credulity of the people. Whatever mystifies, excites curiosity; whatever in turn baffles this curiosity, works the marvelous.
-- Alexander Herrmann -
-
The one thing about program television that's absolutely incompatible with any concept of art is that all decisions have to be made by program directors, whereas art is autonomous. It may be dependent, but it knows no superiors.
-- Alexander Kluge -
It has always been recognized that chess is an art, and its best practitioners have been described as artists.
-- Alexander Kotov -
Gracious acceptance is an art - an art which most never bother to cultivate. We think that we have to learn how to give, but we forget about accepting things, which can be much harder than giving.... Accepting another person's gift is allowing him to express his feelings for you.
-- Alexander McCall Smith -
A sport, a struggle for results and a fight for prizes. I think that the discussion about "chess is science or chess is art" is already inappropriate. The purpose of modern chess is to reach a result.
-- Alexander Morozevich -
-
A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.
-- Alexander Pope -
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance, as those who move easiest have learned to dance.
-- Alexander Pope -
Then sculpture and her sister arts revived; stones leaped to form, and rocks began to live.
-- Alexander Pope -
-
Poets like painters, thus unskilled to trace The naked nature and the living grace, With gold and jewels cover ev'ry part, And hide with ornaments their want of art. True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.
-- Alexander Pope -
Love, Hope, and Joy, fair pleasure's smiling train, Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of pain, These mix'd with art, and to due bounds confin'd Make and maintain the balance of the mind.
-- Alexander Pope -
Still follow sense, of ev'ry art the soul, Parts answering parts shall slide into a whole.
-- Alexander Pope -
Others import yet nobler arts from France, Teach kings to fiddle, and make senates dance.
-- Alexander Pope -
-
So modern 'pothecaries, taught the art By doctor's bills to play the doctor's part, Bold in the practice of mistaken rules, Prescribe, apply, and call their masters fools.
-- Alexander Pope -
Homer excels all the inventors of other arts in this: that he has swallowed up the honor of those who succeeded him.
-- Alexander Pope -
Art still followed where Rome's eagles flew.
-- Alexander Pope -
First follow Nature, and your judgment frame By her just standard, which is still the same: Unerring nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchanged, and universal light, Life, force, and beauty must to all impart, At once the source, and end, and test of art.
-- Alexander Pope -
-
I want to take some quite incredible photographs that have never been taken before... pictures which are simple and complex at the same time, which will amaze and overwhelm people ... I must achieve this so that photography can begin to be considered a form of art.
-- Alexander Rodchenko -
Photography has all the rights, and all the merits, necessary for us to turn towards it as the art of our time.
-- Alexander Rodchenko -
Photography has every right and every merit to claim our attention as the art of our age.
-- Alexander Rodchenko -
Contemporary art is an epoch of false money allied with false culture.
-- Alexander Stoddart -
-
I wanted to be with the men I admired rather than the Scottish Arts Council crowd, so I spent a lot of time in graveyards. You get less trouble from the dead.
-- Alexander Stoddart -
Conceptual art is entirely word-bound. It is, in fact, the kind of art that is exhausted in its verbal description.
-- Alexander Stoddart -
Artists are never complete people. But if it's art that completes them, then what is taken away?
-- Alexander Theroux -
All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.
-- Alexander Trocchi -
-
Reading Proust is like bathing in someone else's dirty water.
-- Alexander Woollcott -
There's nothing wrong with Oscar Levant - nothing a miracle won't cure.
-- Alexander Woollcott -
The scenery in the play was beautiful, but the actors got in front of it.
-- Alexander Woollcott -
Mrs. Patrick Cambell is an aged British battleship sinking rapidly and firing every available gun on her rescuers.
-- Alexander Woollcott -
-
Why are you so weird?" "Because my weird has to be able to cancel out your weird, Lady Cross-stitch." "At least what I do is considered an art form." "Yes, in ye olde medieal Europse you would've been quite the catch-
-- Alexandra Bracken -
That's why I'm so passionate about making music for movies because you dive in and find the best ideas to bring tolife a collective piece of art. ... [Composing] is not a job for me. And that explains why I never stop. Even though it's tough on your body and your brain and the sacrifices you have to make, what can I do? I'm passionate about it so I never stop.
-- Alexandre Desplat -
My art in the last period has all been in small format, but my paintings have become even deeper and more spiritual, speaking truly through colour. Feeling that because of my illness I would not be able to paint very much longer, I worked like a man obsessed on these little 'Meditations' (a long series of small paintings he made during the last years of his life, with as main motif the schema of a face, ed.). And now I leave these small but, to me, important works to the future and to people who love art.
-- Alexej von Jawlensky -
Outstanding past work in photography, and in fact in all the arts, is very important to today's photographers. But it should be used for inspiration and not for imitation. These works should be something to be built upon, not to be repeated.
-- Alexey Brodovitch -
-
Photographers should make three or four prints from one negative and then crop them differently. When I was art director at Harper's Bazaar and at several agencies as a consultant, young photographers would bring me their portfolios and all the prints would be in the same standard proportions, either for the Leica or the Rolleiflex. Many times, by limiting themselves in this way, they missed the true potentialities of their photographs.
-- Alexey Brodovitch -
There are no watertight compartments in our inmost nature.
-- Alexis Carrel -
If men are to remain civilized or to become so, the art of associating together must grow and improve in the same ratio in which the equality of conditions is increased.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville -
Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville -
-
The educator must believe in the potential power of his pupil, and he must employ all his art in seeking to bring his pupil to experience this power.
-- Alfred Adler -
A work of art is like a person: it has more than one soul in its breast.
-- Alfred Brendel -
Art gives a sense of order, life is basically chaotic, and there's a tension between them. A sense of order comes from chaos and contains a bit of it, but it's the sense of order that is important in a work of art...
-- Alfred Brendel -
The blood of my motherland waters a magic plant that cures all ills. That plant is art, and sometimes art needs corruption as a kind of fertilizer
-- Alfred de Musset -
-
Of what use were the arts if they were only the reproduction and the imitation of life?
-- Alfred de Vigny -
Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.
-- Alfred de Vigny -
Every man has seen the wall that limits his mind.
-- Alfred de Vigny -
Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever.
-- Alfred de Vigny -
-
While majority opinion may not take kindly to forms of modern art, that same majority has also been hostile to most original and radical innovations, such as automobiles or airplanes or transatlantic cables or Protestantism or the theory that the earth is round and not flat.
-- Alfred H. Barr, Jr. -
The primary purpose of the Museum is to help people enjoy, understand, and use the visual arts of our time.
-- Alfred H. Barr, Jr. -
Sometimes in the history of art it is possible to describe a period or a generation of artists as having been obsessed by a particular problem.
-- Alfred H. Barr, Jr. -
A good film is when the price of the dinner, the theatre admission and the babysitter were worth it.
-- Alfred Hitchcock -