So vast is art, so narrow human wit. - Alexander Pope

On Art ... A Few Words ... But Not From Me

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
Albert Camus

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.
Theodor Adorno

The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.
Theodor Adorno

Every work of art is an uncommitted crime.
Theodor Adorno

Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose and imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary.
Cecil Beaton

Great art picks up where nature ends.
Marc Chagall

The artist one day falls through a hole in the brambles, and from that moment he is following the dark rapids of an underground river which may sometimes flow so near to the surface that the laughing picnic parties are heard above.
Cyril Connolly

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.
Salvador Dali

The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.
Eugene Delacroix

True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
Albert Einstein

Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rationalism is the enemy of art, though necessary as a basis for architecture.
Arthur Erickson

Only those who attempt the absurd will achieve the impossible. I think it's in my basement... let me go upstairs and check.
M. C. Escher

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.
E. M. Forster

Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed.
Kahlil Gibran

The artist alone sees spirits. But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

If you hear a voice within you say "you cannot paint," then by all means paint, and that voice will be silenced.
Vincent Van Gogh

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.
Abraham Lincoln

You study, you learn, but you guard the original naivete. It has to be within you, as desire for drink is within the drunkard or love is within the lover.
Henri Matisse

I have been no more than a medium, as it were.
Henri Matisse

An artist is always alone - if he is an artist. No, what the artist needs is loneliness.
Henry Miller

We have art in order not to die of the truth.
Friedrich Nietzsche

If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it.
Anais Nin

You've gotta be original, because if you're like someone else, what do they need you for?
Bernadette Peters

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

Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
Twyla Tharp

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.
Harry S. Truman

An artist is someone who produces things that people don't need to have but that he - for some reason - thinks it would be a good idea to give them.
Andy Warhol

I'm afraid that if you look at a thing long enough, it loses all of its meaning.
Andy Warhol

No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist.
Oscar Wilde

All art is quite useless.
Oscar Wilde

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament.
Oscar Wilde

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
Oscar Wilde

I am an artist... I am here to live out loud.
Emile Zola