art
Quotations
Quotations on the topic of ‘art’ from all listed authors (click on the ‘click to view listing’ links to view each quote in full).
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“In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them – unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.” -Theodore Bikel
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“Wushu is a move in Chinese, a physical move. An attack. Wushu is like an art.” -Jet Li
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“Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.” -Joseph Conrad
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“For nine years I worked to change what was hairdressing then into a geometric art form with color, perm without setting which had never been done before.” -Vidal Sassoon
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“I choose films for their artistic value. I don’t need a mansion or a Jaguar. When I leave this Earth, I won’t take any money with me. All I will leave behind will be my art.” -Brad Renfro
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“The idea of avant-garde art is a very suspicious thing to me, the idea that poetry is new and it keeps being new the way Chevrolets every year are new.” -Robert Morgan
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“Tell me thy company, and I’ll tell thee what thou art.” -Miguel de Cervantes
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“Rock isn’t art, it’s the way ordinary people talk.” -Billy Idol
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“Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized.” -James Wolcott
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“Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down.” -Malcolm De Chazal
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“I did this Super-8 film at art school called ‘Tissues,’ this black comedy about a family whose father has been arrested for child molestation. I was absolutely thrilled by every inch of it, and would throw my projector in the back of my car and show it to anybody who would watch it.” -Jane Campion
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“I was very much into buying contemporary art, but I’ve just decided I want to get rid of it all. Not that it’s not great art, but all of a sudden my mood has changed, and I want to go back to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters.” -Sylvester Stallone
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“The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.” -Louise Brooks
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“Science is spectral analysis. Art is light synthesis.” -Karl Kraus
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“My first love is art, and I see a lot of things in an artistic way.” -Robert Carlyle
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“A compromise is the art of dividing a cake in such a way that everyone believes he has the biggest piece.” -Ludwig Erhard
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“I was the hero of the young insurgent working class art movement.” -Elia Kazan
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“The worst state of affairs is when science begins to concern itself with art.” -Paul Klee
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“Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV.” -Ani DiFranco
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“It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.” -Isadora Duncan
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“Celebrity doesn’t have anything to do with art or craft. It’s about being rich and thinking that you’re better than everybody else.” -Joseph Gordon-Levitt
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“Any fool can have bad luck the art consists in knowing how to exploit it.” -Frank Wedekind
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“Good art provides people with a vocabulary about things they can’t articulate.” -Mos Def
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“The art of the parenthesis is one of the greatest secrets of eloquence in Society.” -Nicolas Chamfort
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“I’ve sort of escaped my background, as people often do, through art and culture.” -Danny Boyle
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“Thou art my single day, God lends to leaven What were all earth else, with a feel of heaven.” -Robert Browning
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“The art of being sick is not the same as the art of getting well.” -Tony Snow
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“Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.” -Thomas Hardy
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“I’d like to introduce someone who has just come into my life. I’ve admired him for 35 years. He’s someone who represents integrity, honesty, art, and on top of that stuff I’m actually sleeping with him.” -Shirley MacLaine
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“An art whose medium is language will always show a high degree of critical creativeness, for speech is itself a critique of life: it names, it characterizes, it passes judgment, in that it creates.” -Thomas Mann
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“Art is nothing but the expression of our dream the more we surrender to it the closer we get to the inner truth of things, our dream-life, the true life that scorns questions and does not see them.” -Franz Marc
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“The art of communication is the language of leadership.” -James Humes
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“I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they’re trying to write about. They have music.” -Thom Yorke
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“I think of art as the highest level of creativity. To me, it is one of the greatest sources of enjoyment.” -David Rockefeller
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“More than art, more than literature, music is universally accessible.” -Billy Joel
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“Every man should follow the bent of his nature in art and letters, always provided that he does not offend against the rules of morality and good taste.” -Thomas Edward Brown
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“He has only half learned the art of reading who has not added to it the more refined art of skipping and skimming.” -Arthur Balfour
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“If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust.” -Alan Rickman
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“Seek art from every time and place, in any form, to connect with those who really move you.” -Martha Beck
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“Back then, I didn’t have a big organization around me. I was just a kid with a guitar, traveling around. My responsibility basically was to the art, and I had extra time on my hands. There is no extra time now. There isn’t enough time.” -Joni Mitchell
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“Literature has drawn a funny perimeter that other art forms haven’t.” -Jonathan Safran Foer
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“The art of living does not consist in preserving and clinging to a particular mode of happiness, but in allowing happiness to change its form without being disappointed by the change happiness, like a child, must be allowed to grow up.” -Charles Morgan
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“I think good art does come from a dark place.” -Rick Springfield
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“Reading is an art form, and every man can be an artist.” -Edwin Louis Cole
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“It is a myth that art has to be sold. It is not like stocking a grocery store where people fill a pushcart. Art is a product that has no apparent need. The salesperson builds the need in the mind of the buyer.” -Jack White
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“What I’m doing is art – it’s low-brow art but there’s a magic in that.” -Kesha
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“Art allows people a way to dream their way out of their struggle.” -Russell Simmons
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“I just like art. I get pure pleasure from it. I have a lot of wonderful paintings, and every time I look at them I see something different.” -Jack Nicholson
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“I realize that every picture isn’t a work of art.” -Conrad Hall
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“Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.” -Agnes Martin
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“If you cannot learn to love real art at least learn to hate sham art.” -William Morris
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“Film is a very young art that is still evolving. Soon, we shall reach a balance between content and technology.” -Catherine Deneuve
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“I think people should be given a test much like driver’s tests as to whether they’re capable of being parents! It’s an art form. I talk a lot. And I think a lot. And I draw a lot. But never in a million years would I have been a parent. That’s just work that’s too…
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“For me, pointing and clicking my phone is absolutely fine. People say that isn’t the art of photography but I don’t agree.” -Annie Lennox
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“Wisdom is nothing but a preparation of the soul, a capacity, a secret art of thinking, feeling and breathing thoughts of unity at every moment of life.” -Herman Hesse
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“For as long as I can remember I have suffered from a deep feeling of anxiety which I have tried to express in my art.” -Edvard Munch
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“The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.” -Walter Benjamin
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“Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.” -William Ralph Inge
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“Fashion often starts off beautiful and becomes ugly, whereas art starts off ugly sometimes and becomes beautiful.” -David Bailey
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“Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist.” -Rene Magritte
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“What matters poverty? What matters anything to him who is enamoured of our art? Does he not carry in himself every joy and every beauty?” -Sarah Bernhardt
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“Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don’t want it.” -Duke Ellington
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“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion. Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.” -Remy de Gourmont
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“I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.” -Madeleine L’Engle
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“I’m not dead and I don’t have blue hair but some people say there are similarities. It is usually intolerable to watch myself onscreen but this time it’s fine. I think it’s beautiful and a real work of art.” -Helena Bonham Carter
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“Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That’s how I get my kicks.” -Edward Koch
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“The art of healing comes from nature, not from the physician. Therefore the physician must start from nature, with an open mind.” -Paracelsus
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“It’s high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell’s soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.” -Camille Paglia
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“I have a small house so I borrow everything except art, that’s what I love.” -Salma Hayek
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“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.” -Susan Sontag
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“Art is something to be proud of. Art is no compromise.” -Christian Bale
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“The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant realities the irony diagnoses are revealed and diagnosed, ‘then’ what do we do?” -David Foster Wallace
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“Courage is the art of being the only one who knows you’re scared to death.” -Earl Wilson
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“The downfall of the industry seems to actually be good for art. I think the industry will find their way once the focus shifts from its greed-based origins, downsizes, and begins to support creative visions that speak to our times and shifting ideals.” -Saul Williams
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“The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.” -Robert Hughes
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“I am not a great cook, I am not a great artist, but I love art, and I love food, so I am the perfect traveller.” -Michael Palin
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“What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then, like any great place, it collapsed, and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in the world.” -Emir Kusturica
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“Art is vice. You don’t marry it legitimately, you rape it.” -Edgar Degas
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“Anyway I feel myself a bit on the edge on the art world, but I don’t mind, I’m just pursuing my work in a very excited way. And there isn’t really a mainstream anymore, is there?” -David Hockney
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“In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.” -Marc Chagall
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“I always feel like the art’s there and I just see it, so it’s not really a lot of work.” -Damien Hirst
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“Life is like art. You have to work hard to keep it simple and still have meaning.” -Charles de Lint
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“It’s important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.” -Henry Louis Gates
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“Success and the art of making music are two different things for me.” -Norah Jones
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“How can anybody learn anything from an artwork when the piece of art only reflects the vanity of the artist and not reality?” -Lou Reed
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“If you don’t get noticed, you don’t have anything. You just have to be noticed, but the art is in getting noticed naturally, without screaming or without tricks.” -Leo Burnett
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“It seems almost backwards to me that my music seems the more emotional outlet, and the art stuff seems more about ideas.” -David Byrne
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“Real popular culture is folk art – coalminers’ songs and so forth.” -Noam Chomsky
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“I want to serve chess through games, books that are works of art. I would like to bring the game closer to many people all over the world.” -Garry Kasparov
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“I want art to make me think. In order to do that, it may piss me off, or make me uncomfortable. That promotes awareness and change, or at least some discussion.” -Pink
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“Controversy is part of the nature of art and creativity.” -Yoko Ono
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“Oh yeah, I mean every fighter has got be dedicated, learn how to sacrifice, know what the devotion is all about, make sure you’re paying attention and studying your art.” -Marvin Hagler
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“I am an anarchist in politics and an impressionist in art as well as a symbolist in literature. Not that I understand what these terms mean, but I take them to be all merely synonyms of pessimist.” -Henry Adams
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“The Dancer believes that his art has something to say which cannot be expressed in words or in any other way than by dancing.” -Doris Humphrey
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“Ability is the art of getting credit for all the home runs somebody else hits.” -Casey Stengel
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“Life is very nice, but it lacks form. It’s the aim of art to give it some.” -Jean Anouilh
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“The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.” -Arthur Erickson
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“All works of art are commissioned in the sense that no artist can create one by a simple act of will but must wait until what he believes to be a good idea for a work comes to him.” -W. H. Auden
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“To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song.” -Henri Frederic…
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“I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.” -Judy Chicago
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“In every work of art the subject is primordial, whether the artist knows it or not. The measure of the formal qualities is only a sign of the measure of the artist’s obsession with his subject the form is always in proportion to the obsession.” -Alberto Giacometti
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“In fact, in many ways my mother was quite hippy-dippy, serving macrobiotic food and reading ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.’” -Kristin Scott Thomas
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“Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.” -Edith Wharton
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“Although all the good arts serve to draw man’s mind away from vices and lead it toward better things, this function can be more fully performed by this art, which also provides extraordinary intellectual pleasure.” -Nicolaus Copernicus
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“Surrealism: An archaic term. Formerly an art movement. No longer distinguishable from everyday life.” -Brad Holland
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“I try to give people a different way of looking at their surroundings. That’s art to me.” -Maya Lin
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“I’m very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It’s the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.” -Nick Cave
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“Literature is the art of discovering something extraordinary about ordinary people, and saying with ordinary words something extraordinary.” -Boris Pasternak
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“Raising children is a creative endeavor, an art rather than a science.” -Bruno Bettelheim
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“The whole aspect of cinema and film festivals should be a moment to come together and celebrate art and humanity. It would be a shame if there was such a divide.” -Keanu Reeves
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“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.” -Henry Hazlitt
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“All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order order in yourself. There is much chaos in me, much chaos in our time.” -Otto Dix
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“I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” -Marshall McLuhan
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“The strangeness will wear off and I think we will discover the deeper meanings in modern art.” -Jackson Pollock
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“Customs and convictions change respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.” -John Updike
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“It has always been difficult for Man to realize that his life is all an art. It has been more difficult to conceive it so than to act it so. For that is always how he has more or less acted it.” -Havelock Ellis
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“Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.” -Alvar Aalto
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“As I grew older, I realized that it was much better to insist on the genuine forms of nature, for simplicity is the greatest adornment of art.” -Albrecht Durer
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“I’d love to go to art school. I’d love to learn how to draw. I’d love to be fluent in Spanish. I’d like to be a brain surgeon.” -Billie Joe Armstrong
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“Actually I think Art lies in both directions – the broad strokes, big picture but on the other hand the minute examination of the apparently mundane. Seeing the whole world in a grain of sand, that kind of thing.” -Peter Hammill
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“And I have exposed myself to art so that my work has something beyond just the usual potter.” -Beatrice Wood
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“Originality is the art of concealing your source.” -Franklin P. Jones
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“Art is creative for the sake of realization, not for amusement… for transfiguration, not for the sake of play.” -Max Beckmann
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“I don’t need the money, dear. I work for art.” -Maria Callas
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“When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.” -Max Beerbohm
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“The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.” -Pablo Casals
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“Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.” -Charles Horton Cooley
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“Art is the most passionate orgy within man’s grasp.” -John Donne
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“Form your life humanly, and you have done enough: but you will never reach the height of art and the depth of science without something divine.” -Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel
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“The art world can be very intimidating because it’s just so vast. You talk to people who are really clued in to all the young artists and coming into it you’re never going to be able to catch up immediately, even though there’s pressure to.” -Daniel Radcliffe
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“Your talent is your art. It is not to be taken for granted.” -Paula Abdul
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“You are welcome to your intellectual pastimes and books and art and newspapers welcome, too, to your bars and your whisky that only makes me ill. Here am I in the forest, quite content.” -Knut Hamsun
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“The commonality between science and art is in trying to see profoundly – to develop strategies of seeing and showing.” -Edward Tufte
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“Reason clears and plants the wilderness of the imagination to harvest the wheat of art.” -Austin O’Malley
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“I have discovered the art of deceiving diplomats. I tell them the truth and they never believe me.” -Camillo di Cavour
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“There are so many opportunities in life, that the loss of two or three capabilities is not necessarily debilitating. A handicap can give you the opportunity to focus more on art, writing, or music.” -Jim Davis
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“Smiles come naturally to me, but I started thinking of them as an art form at my command. I studied all the time. I looked at magazines, I’d practice in front of the mirror and I’d ask photographers about the best angles. I can now pull out a smile at will.” -Tyra Banks
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“Art cannot result from sophisticated, frivolous, or superficial effects.” -Hans Hofmann
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“It’s an honor putting art above politics. Politics can be seductive in terms of things reductive to the soul.” -Robert Redford
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“Because most people are not sufficiently employed in themselves, they run about loose, hungering for employment, and satisfy themselves in various supererogatory occupations. The easiest of these occupations, which have all to do with making things already made, is the making of people: it is called the art of friendship.” -Laura Riding
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“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.” -Jean Cocteau
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“I don’t want life to imitate art. I want life to be art.” -Ernst Fischer
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“A Bachelor of Arts is one who makes love to a lot of women, and yet has the art to remain a bachelor.” -Helen Rowland
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“One of the things you’re doing when you make art, apart from entertaining yourself and other people, is trying to see what ways of working feel good, what feels right.” -Brian Eno
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“I don’t think there is such a thing as being too raunchy when it comes to the art form of burlesque.” -Christina Aguilera
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“My parents started with very little and were the only ones in their families to graduate from college. As parents, they focused on education, but did not stop at academics – they made sure that we knew music, saw art and theatre and traveled – even though it meant budgeting like crazy.” -Jennifer Garner
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“Film in the 20th century, it’s the American art form, like jazz.” -Martin Scorsese
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“I don’t think art is propaganda it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.” -Keith Haring
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“I just wish the crowd I was associated with was more passionate about what they were doing and less consumed with the commerce of the art form.” -Shia LaBeouf
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“Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn.” -Norman McLaren
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“The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.” -Arthur Koestler
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“All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.” -Walter Pater
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“I’ve got tonnes of aboriginal and Native American art, but I’d like even more.” -Tori Amos
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“I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times.” -Willie Nelson
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“The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn’t make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.” -Gertrude Stein
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“Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated.” -Auguste Rodin
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“The art of pleasing is the art of deception.” -Luc de Clapiers
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“Modernity signifies the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art of which the other half is the eternal and the immutable.” -Charles Baudelaire
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“The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.” -Pope Paul VI
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“I love prints of skulls and bones and have some taxidermy – a crow and a rabbit – to remind me of home. I like art and have a big portrait of Bjork.” -Ellie Goulding
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“Football is an art, like dancing is an art – but only when it’s well done does it become an art.” -Arsene Wenger
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“The body is your instrument in dance, but your art is outside that creature, the body.” -Martha Graham
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“Education is the art of making man ethical.” -Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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“Modesty: the gentle art of enhancing your charm by pretending not to be aware of it.” -Oliver Herford
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