Art Quotes
Why do you try to understand art? Do you try to understand the song of a bird?
Pablo Picasso
The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle
Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.
Amy Lowell
True art is characterized by an irresistible urge in the creative artist.
Albert Einstein
All art is an individual's expression of a culture. Cultures differ, so art looks different.
Henry Glassie
Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.
John Ciardi
Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.
Bertolt Brecht
Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.
William Butler Yeats
The works of art, by being publicly exhibited and offered for sale, are becoming articles of trade, following as such the unreasoning laws of markets and fashion; and public and even private patronage is swayed by their tyrannical influence.
Albert, Prince Consort
Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.
Willa Sibert Cather
The ultimate politeness in art consists of speaking only to those who are able to uncover and measure its relationships. Anything else is symbolic, and symbolism is merely transcendental imagery.
Jean Maurice Eugne Clment Cocteau
A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.
Jean Maurice Eugne Clment Cocteau
Art is a concrete and personal and rather childish thing after all no matter what people do to graft it into science and make it sociological and psychological; it is no good at all unless it is let alone to be itself a game of make-believe, or re-production, very exciting and delightful to people who have an ear for it or an eye for it.
Willa Sibert Cather
For me the purest and truest art in the world is science fiction.
C. J. Cherryh
