Quotes about Art

“The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.”

“No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.”

“If art can be at the service of anything, it's about letting us see a state of grace for those people who rarely get to be able to be seen that way.”

“I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art that anybody could ever want to own.”

“It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.”

“Shadows sometimes people don't see shadows. The Chinese of course never paint them in pictures, oriental art never deals with shadow. But I noticed these shadows and I knew it meant it was sunny.”

“Architecture is the art of how to waste space.”

“The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”

“Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down.”

“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.”

“Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.”

“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.”

“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.”

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”

“Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.”

“Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.”

“To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art; men can only make us feel small in the wrong way.”

“I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.”

“Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.”

“All art is theft.”

“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.”