Art Quotations

Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.

Who has a harder fight than he who is striving to overcome himself.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.

Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.

If I create from the heart, nearly everything works; if from the head, almost nothing.

I do not want art for a few any more than education for a few, or freedom for a few.

Thought is a strenuous art - few practice it, and then only at rare times.

The secret of my influence has always been that it remained secret.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

Chess is everything: art, science, and sport.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts.

Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art.

What other people may find in poetry or art museums, I find in the flight of a good drive: the white ball sailing up into the sky, reaching its apex, falling and finally dropping to the turf, just the way I planned it.

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

There are no contests in the Art of Peace. A true warrior is invincible because he or she contests with nothing. Defeat means to defeat the mind of contention that we harbor within.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Diversity: the art of thinking independently together.

Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

Art is what you can get away with.

I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.

Intelligence without ambition is a bird without wings.

The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.

The beauty of a finely worked object points to the beauty of the craftsmanship. The beauty of the craftsmanship points to the beauty of the name which was the source of the craftsmanship. The beauty of the name of the craftsman's art points to the beauty of the craftsman's attributes manifested in that art.

It's an art to live with pain... mix the light into gray.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that we live, if we do.

Egotism: The art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.

I think the key to great art and great artists is to just fully be yourself and not be scared of that, and be the extremes of your personality. Show the extremes of your personality and embrace the imperfections. Embrace the things about yourself that you might not like.

I definitely believe that art is the best way to produce social change.

The artist's world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.

Critics have a job to do. I understand that. It's not just to criticize. They're trying to interpret art for the public.

I went to university in Colorado and studied art history. I did some photography classes there, although it felt really pretentious.

I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable.

Don't avoid extremes, and don't choose any one extreme. Remain available to both the polarities - that is the art, the secret of balancing.

The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.

A great artist is always before his time or behind it.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Jazz music and, more specifically, jazz musicians, are my artistic heroes. I want to be the Thelonious Monk of acting. He had no concern for how well he was received. He played whatever he wanted whenever he wanted. He just wasn't interested in achieving the good opinion of his audience. That's the Holy Grail of acting; of any art form.

I actually no longer use 'art' as the framing device. I think I'm just kind of practicing things, practicing life, practicing creation.

I was walking down a street and after his death and saw a billboard on the side of a brick wall for Van's shoes. It was a picture of Hopper's face, and all it said was, 'Hopper Lives.' So I think he's still part of youth culture. There are lessons to be learned from Hopper about being a young person who wants to live the art life in America.

I get approached to do a lot of commissioned art. Sometimes I do it, but I usually don't, given the day job and everything I've sort of got going on. I'm really passionate about it; there's not that much time left over for the other commissioned projects.

'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' was this role that utterly fell into my lap and changed my life.

When you start a company, it's more an art than a science because it's totally unknown. Instead of solving high-profile problems, try to solve something that's deeply personal to you. Ideally, if you're an ordinary person and you've just solved your problem, you might have solved the problem for millions of people.

All equestrians, if they last long enough, learn that riding in whatever form is a lifelong sport and art, an endeavor that is both familiar and new every time you take the horse out of his stall or pasture.

That's something I learned in art school. I studied graphic design in Germany, and my professor emphasized the responsibility that designers and illustrators have towards the people they create things for.

I'm not a culture snob. So while, of course, I think the Mozart 'Requiem' or, say, Beethoven's 'Ninth' are some of the greatest works of art in the history of humankind, that's not to say the Beatles or Queen or Simon and Garfunkel aren't brilliant, beautiful, important works of art that should be sung without a sense of irony.

I enjoy looking, learning, smiling, and engaging with art, sometimes even rejecting it.

All art to me is an empathetic act. Whoever's telling a story is trying to transfer emotion into someone else.

I think the point of art is to be controversial in a lot of ways. It's to cause conversations, and it's to get people excited about and talking about the things that the films are about.

Part of what I do and what I want to do is I want to bring art into the everyday life. If you can take ordinary just walking in the street and you're confronted by something, that might change your day - it might inspire you.

I refuse to confide and don't like it when people write about art.

Raising children is a creative endeavor, an art rather than a science.

And I had worked at the comic-book store almost by accident, because I was deciding to make a living as an artist, be it as an art tutor or illustrator, and that's how I wanted to make my living.

Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine art; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest in which to reach true excellence.

The course of Nature is the art of God

It is not up to me whether I win or lose. Ultimately, this might not be my day. And it is that philosophy towards sports, something that I really truly live by. I am emotional. I want to win. I am hungry. I am a competitor. I have that fire. But deep down, I truly enjoy the art of competing so much more than the result.

Nude nail polish wins hands down over intricate nail art.

Most museums - with all their burdens to pay for exhibitions, administration, and security - really don't have any money really to acquire art, with few exceptions.

I am guilty of using dollar signs as proof of a work of art's longevity.

Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.

Any art worthy of its name should address 'life', 'man', 'nature', 'death' and 'tragedy'.

I used to stay up all night playing 'Resident Evil 2,' and it wouldn't stop until the sun came up. Then I'd walk outside at dawn's first light, looking at the empty streets of London, and it was like life imitating art. It felt like I'd stepped into an actual zombie apocalypse.

Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America, no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.

As long as i live i will have control over my being

I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I tell them the truth and they never believe me.

In Japan, I am famous in certain special circles - mainly as someone who is trying to break down and enlighten the conventions of Japanese art.

I'm giving into my tendency to want to blur and blend the lines between art and life, and privacy and sharing.

As an artist, you want to make good stories and create good art; as a businessman, you want to make money and make sure the investors are happy. The two will always clash, unfortunately.

Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.

In the big picture, architecture is the art and science of making sure that our cities and buildings fit with the way we want to live our lives.

I profoundly feel that the art of living is the art of giving. You're fulfilled in the moment of giving, of doing something beyond yourself.

A lot of art and visual crafts are based on appropriating things.

Pollock said several times that he couldn't separate himself from his art. Not knowing much about modern art when I began to read about him, I was much more his persona - his struggles as a human being - that was interesting to me.

People talk about making art films - experimental films. I can make an art film every day of the week. Nothing to it. What's difficult is to combine a commercial film with art.

Is art influential? It can be - 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' rallied abolitionists, and 'The Jungle' provoked the demand for a safer food industry.

Art should be witty, like a good Eddie Murphy movie, to make your life a little easier and better.

I do a lot of work on computers, but I am so practiced in drawing that I can draw it full size, and you can take the measurements off my drawings. It's like drafting, but it's a work of art - a really beautiful drawing.

I personally don't care for abstract art. I have always felt, 'To each his own.' There's art out there for everybody.

There are so many awful things in this world, but I wanted readers to share with me the small, beautiful, enjoyable things. Things like cute clothes, beautiful art and pretty flowers; items that are overflowing with beauty. If you just become obsessed with your own problems, you miss these things. When you discover them, you become happy.

Art is the objectification of feeling, and the subjectification of nature.

I dug up some old John Buscema 'Conan' comics. Man, when Alfredo Alcala was inking, that was some of the most beautiful black and white comic art ever published. The stories are good, too, though early '70s comics based on Conan is a festival of sexist, racist stereotypes.

The walls between art and engineering exist only in our minds.

We at BMW do not build cars as consumer objects, just to drive from A to B. We build mobile works of art.

A script arrived, and on the front cover - scrawled really big, as if it were a book report - is 'Django Unchained, written by Quentin Tarantino.' And I thought, 'Well, no art department came up with this; this is Quentin's writing.'

If we are going to change our diets, we first have to relearn the art of eating, which is a question of psychology as much as nutrition. We have to find a way to want to eat what's good for us.

There hasn't been any art yet. Art is just beginning.

If a patron buys from an artist who needs money, the patron then makes himself equal to the artist; he is building art into the world; he creates.

In art, there is no need for color; I see only light and shade. Give me a crayon, and I will paint your portrait.

I had a dream of music and art and the big city in which I would get lost, where no one would know me and I wouldn't know anyone, where I would work at some ordinary job, and if one day I got up in the morning and decided I wasn't going to go to work anymore, no one would ask questions.

Art is art. Everything else is everything else.

If a man devotes himself to art, much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.

Life is an illusion. I am held together in the nothingness by art.

By the will art thou lost, by the will art thou found, by the will art thou free, captive, and bound.