Best 22487 quotes in «art quotes» category

if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.

If music is frozen architecture, then the potpourri is frozen coffee-table gossip... Potpourri is the art of adding apples to pears.

If not in the interests of the state, do not act. If you cannot succeed, do not use troops. If you are not in danger, do not fight.

If my art has nothing to do with people's pain and sorrow, what is 'art' for?

If nature has been frugal in her gifts and endowments, there is the more need of art to supply her defects. If she has been generous and liberal, know that she still expects industry and application on our part, and revenges herself in proportion to our negligent ingratitude. The richest genius, like the most fertile soil, when uncultivated, shoots up into the rankest weeds; and instead of vines and olives for the pleasure and use of man, produces, to its slothful owner, the most abundant crop of poisons.

If nothing were left of an extinct race but a single button, I would be able to infer, form the shape of that button, how these people dressed, built their houses, how they lived, what was their religion, their art, their mentality.

If one of our players gets his second foul in the first half, then he must come out of the game and not re-enter until the second half. To play defense and not foul is an art that must be mastered if you are going to be successful.

If one cannot accept failure and scorn, how is he to make his art? It's like wanting to go to heaven without dying.

If one has to earn a living, therefore, the safest occupation is that most remote from the arts.

If one of God's children finds he cannot see or feel life in other terms than those of form, if he tries to escape and live outside of this obsession and fails, he generally calls himself a sculptor.

I foresee it and yet I hardly ever carry it out as I foresee it. It transforms itself by the actual paint. I don't in fact know very often what the paint will do, and it does many things which are very much better than I could make it do.

If only art were as rare as good taste.

If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust.

If only we could persuade galleries to observe a fallow period in which, for two months every other year, new and old works of art could be sold in back rooms and all main galleries would be devoted to revisiting shows gone by.

I found myself in my first art school under the direction of Robert Henri... My life began at this point.

I found so-called great art too pompous, too stiff. What at this time was called minor art was freer, more imaginative, more open to all kinds of unorthodox expression, all kinds of daring in the handling of materials, and I preferred to surround myself with this type of art than with the great collectors' pieces. I had always in my mind that I was collecting for learning.

If our ballets be feeble, monotonous and dull, if they be devoid of ideas, meaning, expression and character, it is less the fault of the art than that of the artist.

I found so much fun in the light shows and the multimedia shows of the hippies. That was when I was a student in the 1960s, and I was in New York, so I learned how to deal with writing, recording sound of other people, performance art - because that was a new territory, and I liked everything that was new and provocative. That interested me more than becoming anything specific.

I found that a lot of people ridiculed contemporary art. I decided I wanted to be involved in art everybody could understand.

I found that it wasn't so oddball to like music and poetry and visual arts, they're kindred spirits.

...If our houses, or clothes, our household furniture and utensils are not works of art, they are either wretched makeshifts, or, what is worse, degrading shams of better things.

I found my God in music and the arts, with writers like Hermann Hesse, and musicians like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter. In some way, in some form, my God was always there, but now I have learned to talk to him.

If people come up to me, I'm going to be nice to them. Essentially, the assumption is that they support what I do. If I met someone I'd be like, "Hey, I respect your art or your work," and then that's it - let's not go beyond that. But sometimes people are like, "What's going on, man?" "I'm on the street, and we've never met before.

If oxen and lions had hands and could paint with their hands and produce works of art, as men do, horses would paint the forms of the gods likes horses and oxen like oxen. Each would represent them with bodies according to the bodies of each. So the Ethiopians make their gods black and snub-nosed; the Thracians give theirs red hair and blue eyes.

If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all.

If people knew how hard I worked at my art, they would not consider me a genius.

If people lacked the capacity to receive the thoughts of the men who preceded them and to pass on to others their own thoughts, men would be like wild beasts. And if men lacked this other capacity of being infected by art, people would be almost more savage still, and, above all, more separated from and more hostile to one another. Therefore the activity of art is a most important one, as important as the activity of speech itself and as generally diffused.

If people really stopped and realized how much art and creative people move the world versus politics and religion, I mean it’s not even up for debate. An artist at least creates things, puts things into the world. Where as these other people are destroying things, taking things out of the world.

If painting is no longer needed, it seems a pity that some of us are born into the world with such a passion for line and color.

If people want to see Beaux-Arts, it's fine with me. I'm interested in good architecture as anybody else.

If politically infused music is denied airplay, music reviews or festival stage time because it is considered "politics" rather than "art", then there will be no music left to ban. It will never reach the surface anyway, not to the larger audience. I believe that there is a high degree of censorship in the west, most importantly in the form of self-censorship among musicians themselves. This is why what you hear on the radio is - increasingly often - pure and toothless entertainment. Almost by definition, there's nothing left in pop music worth banning.

If quick, I survive. If not quick, I am lost. This is death.

If Richard Wagner lived today, he would probably work with film instead of music. He already knew back then that the 'Great Art Form' would include a sort of fourth dimension; it was really film he was talking about.

If people want new music then they are going to have to figure out a way to be patrons of the arts. And they will.

If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.

...if photos can reproduce the world more perfectly than any painter, can capture an instant, a look, a gesture, then what makes a painting good anymore? Painting subverts this subversion of its traditional nature by redefining itself - art is idea, not simply skillful execution. So, a work can be crudely made, or even machine made - but it has to be practically and functionally useless.

If politics is the art of the possible, research is surely the art of the soluble. Both are immensely practical-minded affairs.

If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.

If reality impacted directly on our senses and our consciousness, if we could have direct communication between the material world and ourselves, art would be unnecessary.

If sanity ever returns to our society and we stop taking pretentious elites seriously, one of the signs will be that the public will force the removal of those ugly pieces of twisted metal that are called 'art' in front of government buildings.

If people were able to be convinced that art is precise advance knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they all become artists?

If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.

If purpose, then, is inherent in art, so is it in Nature also. The best illustration is the case of a man being his own physician, for Nature is like that - agent and patient at once.

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain?

If some of the greats had followed the traditional ways we would be missing so much fine art.

If some of this art is not for you, that's fine. Art appreciation is a subjective matter, and we each bring our own experience, knowledge and taste to the party.

If someone asked me if I could have anything in the world, what would l want? If l could own anything, like owning a piece of art, l think it would be Elton John's publishing, on his first seven albums. I don't want the money. Being able to own those songs Is like owning a painting of someone you admire.

If size mattered, the elephant would be king of the jungle.

If someone took the finest marble and knew how to shape it artfully: Prometheus' material was lowly clay, but his statues walked.

If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.