Quotes About Art

I refuse the title of artist to those who owe their reputations to a physical deformity. I regard them as buffoons.

Art actually happens somewhere in the space between clarity and ambiguity, concept and intuition, thought and feeling.

The painter, Edouard Manet, once observed: "There are no lines in nature, only areas of color, one against another.

It beats down on the head like Chinese water torture and, eventually, can take all the pleasure out of drawing.

Art is not a mirror to hold up to reality, rather a hammer to shape it.

Love is the desire to give, not to receive, something. Love is the art of producing something with the other's talents.

Art is not a mirror held up to society but a hammer with which to shape it.

Art is never without consequences.

El arte no es un espejo para reflejar la realidad, sino un martillo para darle forma.

All artforms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living.

Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.

The main things which seem to me important on their own account, and not merely as means to other things, are knowledge, art, instinctive happiness, and relations of frendship or affection.

The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit root yug, which means "to yoke or harness." Since 500 B.C., yoga has traditionally referred to the art of "yoking." or hooking up, the lower (or individual) consciousness with the higher (or universal) consciousness. Over the centuries the word yoga has also been used to mean "union," and often refers not only to the union between lower and higher levels of consciousness, but union between mind and body.

I love sad songs. They say so much. I love country music but even the happy songs sound really sad.

Some really good things kind of swing both ways and I like to see people that can swing really, really, really sad and horrible and terrible and really, really, really beautiful and funny.

I realized that Southern hospitality not only came from the heart but was a practiced social art that had been passed down from one generation to the next—like fine silverware or china. Southerners had a way of doing things that made you feel special

As I watched all the comings and goings and listened to the charming "Welcome to Savannah's" and the heartfelt "I'm so pleased to meet you's" that dripped like honey from these women's lips, I realized that Southern hospitality not only came from the heart but was a practiced social art that had been passed down from one generation to the next--like fine silverware or china.

Explain little. Evoke all.

Proficiency is not benevolence. There is an art to being present.

Because sentences are for making," I finally said. "Sentences are the risks we take.

Throughout her life, Henriette Wyeth has to decide: Love or work. Fidelity or freedom. Beauty or snark. East or west. Her father's daughter or her husband's wife. Her children's mother or her artist's heart—her palette or her paint, her feathers or her shells.

The author describes how impressed she was with the detailed storyboards that outlined her movie – "not just sketches, but real art". She then describes a Hawaiian sunset as, "God painting His storyboard on the sky".

The world doesn't fully make sense until the writer has secured his version of it on the page. And the act of writing is strangely more lifelike than life.

No matter how many compromises were made along the way, no matter what happens in the future, a book is a thing to behold.