Quotes on Art

Entertainment provides relief. Art provokes engagement.

What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter - a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.

If I'm going to be anything more than average, if anyone is going to remember me, then I need to go further, in art, in life, in everything!

Politics is the art of the possible; creativity is the art of the impossible.

Instead of art I have taught philosophy. Though technique for me is a big word, I never have taught how to paint. All my doing was to make people to see.

More important than a work of art itself is what it will sow. Art can die, a painting can disappear. What counts is the seed.

The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before.

The realists do not take the photograph for a 'copy' of reality, but for an emanation of past reality, a magic, not an art.

Magic becomes art when it has nothing to hide.

A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.

Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability.

Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.

Art is the perpetual motion of illusion. The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do? What else can you do for any one but inspire them?

America was indebted to immigration for her settlement and prosperity. That part of America which had encouraged them most had advanced most rapidly in population, agriculture and the arts.

Note too that a faithful study of the liberal arts humanizes character and permits it not to be cruel.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Music is the purest form of art... therefore true poets...seek to express the universe in terms of music. The singer has everything within him. The notes come out from his very life. They are not materials gathered from outside.

Genius is the ability to put into effect what is on your mind.

Any great art work … revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

A painting in an interior spreads joy around it by the colors, which calm us.

Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it.