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Quotes about art

621 quotes from 285 people

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Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth, by calling imagination to the help of reason.
Samuel Johnson1709–1784Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)
- Poetry
Drawing is the honesty of the art. There is no possibility of cheating. It is either good or bad.
Salvador Dalí1904–1989Quote from People, 27 September 1976
Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.
Winston Churchill1874–1965From a speech given at the Royal Academy of Art in 1953; quoted in Time magazine (11 May 1954).
That terrible mood of depression of whether it’s any good or not is what is known as The Artist’s Reward.
Ernest Hemingway1899–1961Letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald (13 September 1929); published in Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961 (1981) edited by Carlos Baker
A masterpiece of art has in the mind a fixed place in the chain of being, as much as a plant or a crystal.
Ralph Waldo Emerson1803–1882Society and Solitude (1870), Art
Fantasy is a higher form of Art, indeed the most nearly pure form, and so (when achieved) the most potent.
J. R. R. Tolkien1892–1973On Fairy-Stories (1939)
One becomes a critic when one cannot be an artist, just as a man becomes a stool pigeon when he cannot be a soldier.
Gustave Flaubert1821–1880Letters to Madame Louise Colet, 22 October 1846
- Clever Jabs
A drainless shower
Of light is poesy; ’tis the supreme of power;
’Tis might half slumb’ring on its own right arm.
John Keats1795–1821Poems (1817)
- Poetry
Poetry is the opening and closing of a door, leaving those who look through to guess about what is seen during a moment.
Carl Sandburg1878–1967“Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry”, in Complete Poems (1950)
- Poetry
Poetry is finer and more philosophical than history; for poetry expresses the universal, and history only the particular.
Aristotle384–322 BCPoetics, 1451b.6
- History
- Poetry
It is the glory and good of Art
That Art remains the one way possible
Of speaking truth,⁠—to mouths like mine, at least.
Robert Browning1812–1889The Ring and the Book (1868-69)
- Truth & Lies
If I were a better artist, I’d be a painter, and if I were a better writer, I’d write books — but I’m not, so I draw cartoons!
Charles M. Schulz1922–20001992, as quoted by Tom Tomorrow in his comic strip This Modern World (21 February 2000)
- Writing
He that thinks himself capable of astonishing may write blank verse: but those that hope only to please must condescend to rhyme.
Samuel Johnson1709–1784Lives of the English Poets (1779–81)
- Poetry
An intellectual is a man who says a simple thing in a difficult way; an artist is a man who says a difficult thing in a simple way.
Charles Bukowski1920–1994Notes of a Dirty Old Man (1969)
- Intelligence
The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.
Andy Warhol1928–1987‘What is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters’, Part 1, G. R. Swenson, in Art News 62 (November 1963)