Explore Quotes on Art

We spend a good part of our lives trying desperately to convince ourselves as well as everybody else that we know more than we really do.

Knowing the steps to create living growth: that is art.

Reverence for life . . . does not allow the scholar to live for his science alone, even if he is very useful . . . the artist to exist only for his art, even if he gives inspiration to many. . . . It refuses to let the business man imagine that he fulfills all legitimate demands in the course of his business activities. It demands from all that they should sacrifice a portion of their own lives for others.

The art of life is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candor. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception.

Art supplies constantly to contemplation what nature seldom affords in concrete experience - the union of life and peace.

Life is more important than art; that's what makes art important.

The art of life, of a poet's life, is, not having anything to do, to do something.

The great art of life is how to turn the surplus life of the soul into life for the body.

Obviously, where art has it over life is in the matter of editing. Life can be seen to suffer from a drastic lack of editing. It stops too quick, or else it goes on too long. Worse, its pacing is erratic. Some chapters are little more than a few sentences in length, while others stretch into volumes. Life, for all its raw talent, has little sense of structure. It creates amazing textures, but it can't be counted on for snappy beginnings or good endings either. Indeed, in many cases no ending is provided at all.

Sycamore trees were held to be sacred in ancient Egypt and are the first trees represented in ancient art. The sycamore, also, was sacred. Peasants gather around them in rituals. In the Land of the Dead there was a sycamore in whose branches the goddess Hathor lived; she leaned out of it giving sustenance and water to deceased souls. In Memphis, Hathor's epithet was Lady of the Sycamore.

In the hands of the discoverer, medicine becomes a heroic art . . wherever life is dear he is a demigod.

Art is the act of triggering deep memories, of what it means to be fully human.

I exist in the world and live in my art.

The art of writing fiction is to sail as dangerously close to the truth as possible without sinking the ship

Happiness is the art of relaxation.

One judges an epoch as much by its Art as by its customs.

My art tends toward the literary. My pictures tend toward the outskirts of painting: But why generalize? It is possible to realize one thing or another, according to the impressions gained from one point of view or another. But it is too difficult to make a general rule.

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.

The war brought out all the art in me.

My opinion of art is that a man should have love for it, because my idea is that he paints from his heart and mind.

Egotism is the art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.