Quotes on Art

Where there is no style, there is no slave. Martial Arts mean honestly expressing yourself. No style. No slave.

Ask yourself what problem you have right now. Not next year, tomorrow or five minutes from now. You can always cope with the now, but you can never cope with the future. Nor do you have to. The answer, the strength and the right action will be there when you need it. Not before or after.

The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.

Music is the perfect type of art.

In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.

"The work of art must seize upon you...carry you away."

Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use – do the work you want to see done.

We need to eliminate the existing hierarchy of subjects. Elevating some disciplines over others only reinforces outmoded assumptions of industrialism and offends the principle of diversity. The arts, sciences, humanities, physical education, languages and maths all have equal and central contributions to make to a student's education.

Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art; it arises in hypothesis and flows into achievement.

Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or the arts are melancholic?

The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.

Graffiti is one of the few tools you have if you have almost nothing. And even if you don't come up with a picture to cure world poverty you can make someone smile while they're having a piss.

Eternity is not an everlasting flux of time, but time is as a short parenthesis in a long period.

Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.

Science is feasible when the variables are few and can be enumerated; when their combinations are distinct and clear. We are tending toward the condition of science and aspiring to do it. The artist works out his own formulas; the interest of science lies in the art of making science.

Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things, is the proper aim of Art.

Well, Art is Art, isn't it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.

An exhibition is in many ways a series of conversations. Between the artist and viewer, curator and viewer, and between the works of art themselves. It clicks when an exhibition feels like it has answered some questions, and raised even more.

There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.

Whenever I think about movies, I always look at that art process as having the best of a lot of worlds. Because if you watch a great film, you have a musical element to it, not just on the scoring, but in the way that the shots are edited - that has music and rhythm and time.