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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“I don’t watch television, I think it destroys the art of talking about oneself.” -Stephen Fry
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“All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn’t read it the way you read history or science.” -Leslie Fiedler
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“To injure an opponent is to injure yourself. To control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.” -Morihei Ueshiba
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“People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.” -Claude Monet
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“Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess?” -Ludwig van Beethoven
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“Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.” -Toni Morrison
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“Art is always criticized and always an outsider gets the blame.” -Ville Valo
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“There is no more difficult art to acquire than the art of observation, and for some men it is quite as difficult to record an observation in brief and plain language.” -William Osler
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“Art saved me it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.” -Jeanette Winterson
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“Artists don’t talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it’s stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.” -Paddy Chayefsky
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“Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that’s it. No America, no jazz. I’ve seen people try to connect it to other countries, for instance to Africa, but it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Africa.” -Art Blakey
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“Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.” -Alfred North Whitehead
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“I’m very much into the costuming of any character that I portray and it’s one of the great things about making movies is it’s a collaborative art form so you get all these artists who are looking specifically about for this instance your character’s costume and what that might tell about your character.” -Jeff Bridges
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“Piano playing is a dying art. I love the fact that I can be one guy with one instrument evoking an emotional and musical experience.” -Jon Bon Jovi
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“I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists.” -Marcel Duchamp
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“Art is like a border of flowers along the course of civilization.” -Lincoln Steffens
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“Life is the only art that we are required to practice without preparation, and without being allowed the preliminary trials, the failures and botches, that are essential for training.” -Lewis Mumford
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“Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.” -Robert Motherwell
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“It’s an art to live with pain… mix the light into gray.” -Eddie Vedder
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“Art and science have their meeting point in method.” -Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton
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“I do not regard advertising as entertainment or an art form, but as a medium of information.” -David Ogilvy
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“Love the art in yourself and not yourself in the art.” -Constantin Stanislavski
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“A nation devoid of art and artists cannot have a full existence.” -Kemal Ataturk
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“I got my diploma from Ealing College of Art, in graphics and illustration.” -Freddie Mercury
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“Diplomacy, n. is the art of letting somebody else have your way.” -David Frost
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“In the first book of my Discworld series, published more than 26 years ago, I introduced Death as a character there was nothing particularly new about this – death has featured in art and literature since medieval times, and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.” -Terry Pratchett
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“In mathematics the art of proposing a question must be held of higher value than solving it.” -Georg Cantor
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“Poetry is a beautiful way of spoiling prose, and the laborious art of exchanging plain sense for harmony.” -Horace Walpole
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“Music is God’s gift to man, the only art of Heaven given to earth, the only art of earth we take to Heaven.” -Walter Savage Landor
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“The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.” -Golda Meir
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“I think art is inherently nonviolent and it actually occupies your mind with creation rather than destruction.” -Anthony Kiedis
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“Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business.” -Paul Valery
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“The cult of art gives pride one never has too much of it.” -Gustave Flaubert
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“With care, and skill, and cunning art, She parried Time’s malicious dart, And kept the years at bay, Till passion entered in her heart and aged her in a day!” -Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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“Once you take yourself too seriously the art will suffer.” -Maynard James Keenan
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“Trauma happens in relationships, so it can only be healed in relationships. Art can’t provide healing. It can be cathartic and therapeutic but a relationship is a three-part journey.” -Alanis Morissette
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“To play safe, I prefer to accept only one type of power: the power of art over trash, the triumph of magic over the brute.” -Vladimir Nabokov
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“Writing is truly a creative art – putting word to a blank piece of paper and ending up with a full-fledged story rife with character and plot.” -William Shatner
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“Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art it is the part the schools cannot recognize.” -James Joyce
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“As in nature, as in art, so in grace it is rough treatment that gives souls, as well as stones, their luster.” -Thomas Guthrie
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“Man is unique not because he does science, and his is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvelous plasticity of mind.” -Jacob Bronowski
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“I don’t listen to what art critics say. I don’t know anybody who needs a critic to find out what art is.” -Jean-Michel Basquiat
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“We’re all entitled to opinions about how art institutions should behave, and entitled to voicing those opinions through whatever means available to us. We’re also allowed to change or modify our opinions.” -Jerry Saltz
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“I was doing these performance art pop music pieces in the city. And they were a bit on the eccentric side I suppose. So people started to call me Gaga after the Queen song ‘Radio Gaga.’” -Lady Gaga
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“A rose is the visible result of an infinitude of complicated goings on in the bosom of the earth and in the air above, and similarly a work of art is the product of strange activities in the human mind.” -Clive Bell
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“Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.” -William Bernbach
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“I would no more quarrel with a man because of his religion than I would because of his art.” -Mary Baker Eddy
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“Is art really the priesthood that demands the pure in heart who belong to it wholly?” -Paul Cezanne
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“The essential function of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.” -David Herbert Lawrence
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“Art is so subjective, and people can react however they want.” -Jennifer Aniston
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“I’m free. I just do what I want, say what I want, say how I feel, and I don’t try to hurt nobody. I just try to make sure that I don’t compromise my art in any kind of way, and I think people respect that.” -Erykah Badu
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“I didn’t grow up thinking of movies as film, or art, but as movies, something to do on a Saturday afternoon.” -Sydney Pollack
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“The art of living is the art of knowing how to believe lies.” -Cesare Pavese
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“Let’s talk of a system that transforms all the social organisms into a work of art, in which the entire process of work is included… something in which the principle of production and consumption takes on a form of quality. It’s a Gigantic project.” -Joseph Beuys
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“Any authentic work of art must start an argument between the artist and his audience.” -Rebecca West
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“One of the most amazing things about mathematics is the people who do math aren’t usually interested in application, because mathematics itself is truly a beautiful art form. It’s structures and patterns, and that’s what we love, and that’s what we get off on.” -Danica McKellar
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“It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.” -Wilson Mizner
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“Everything that has ever been called folk art has always reflected domination.” -Theodor Adorno
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“The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art, but by no means all, seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.” -Edward Hopper
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“You can’t but know that if you can capture the emotions of the audience as well as their minds, the play will work better, because it’s a narrative art form.” -Tom Stoppard
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“Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn. They teach you there’s a boundary line to music. But, man, there’s no boundary line to art.” -Charlie Parker
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“Film editing is now something almost everyone can do at a simple level and enjoy it, but to take it to a higher level requires the same dedication and persistence that any art form does.” -Walter Murch
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“Love and business and family and religion and art and patriotism are nothing but shadows of words when a man’s starving!” -O. Henry
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“It ought to be illegal for an artist to marry. If the artist must marry let him find someone more interested in art, or his art, or the artist part of him, than in him. After which let them take tea together three times a week.” -Ezra Pound
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“Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.” -Publilius Syrus
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“The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.” -John Lasseter
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“What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is only related to objects, and not to individuals, or to life.” -Michel Foucault
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“To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.” -Herman Melville
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“To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.” -Will Durant
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“Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” -Ingmar Bergman
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“Egotism: The art of seeing in yourself what others cannot see.” -George V. Higgins
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“I don’t think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today. But it’s certainly worth a try.” -Steven Spielberg
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“I think that one’s art is a growth inside one. I do not think one can explain growth. It is silent and subtle. One does not keep digging up a plant to see how it grows.” -Emily Carr
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“After a few months in my parents’ basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.” -David Sedaris
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“Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.” -Raymond Chandler
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“Nature scarcely ever gives us the very best for that we must have recourse to art.” -Baltasar Gracian
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“Art gives me the freedom I don’t have when I make music.” -Marilyn Manson
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“Resolve and thou art free.” -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
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“The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is to things made by his art.” -Thomas Aquinas
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“Riding a race bike is an art – a thing that you do because you feel something inside.” -Valentino Rossi
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“At the University of Maryland, my first year I started off planning to major in art because I was interested in theatre design, stage design or television design.” -Jim Henson
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“Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design, just as art, has multiple definitions there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.” -Paul Rand
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“I don’t have anything to say about other people’s art and their work.” -Dolly Parton
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“Patience is the art of concealing your impatience.” -Guy Kawasaki
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“The screen is a magic medium. It has such power that it can retain interest as it conveys emotions and moods that no other art form can hope to tackle.” -Stanley Kubrick
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“The art of pleasing consists in being pleased.” -William Hazlitt
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“I’m enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that’s considered artistic, there’s a commercial world around it: the ballet, opera, any kind of music. It can’t exist without it.” -Steve Martin
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“Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.” -Simone Weil
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“When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man’s name live for thousands of years.” -Denis Diderot
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“I like it when somebody tells me a story, and I actually really feel that that’s becoming like a lost art in American cinema.” -Quentin Tarantino
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“Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.” -Claude Debussy
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“To the man who loves art for its own sake, it is frequently in its least important and lowliest manifestations that the keenest pleasure is to be derived.” -Arthur Conan Doyle
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“In art and dream may you proceed with abandon. In life may you proceed with balance and stealth.” -Patti Smith
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“There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.” -Ansel Adams
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“Art is the collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.” -Andre Gide
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“The love of all-inclusiveness is as dangerous in philosophy as in art.” -George Santayana
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“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.” -John Kenneth Galbraith
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“We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” -Henry James
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“Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.” -Frederic Chopin
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“Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.” -Alice Walker
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“The best part of the art of living is to know how to grow old gracefully.” -Eric Hoffer
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“Besides the noble art of getting things done, there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.” -Lin Yutang
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“Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.” -Rita Mae Brown
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“Errors are not in the art but in the artificers.” -Isaac Newton
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“The educator must believe in the potential power of his pupil, and he must employ all his art in seeking to bring his pupil to experience this power.” -Alfred Adler
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“I consider skateboarding an art form, a lifestyle and a sport. ‘Action sport’ would be the least offensive categorization.” -Tony Hawk
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“The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.” -John Keats
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“In science, as in art, and, as I believe, in every other sphere of human activity, there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors, but it is only in one or two of them.” -Thomas Huxley
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“People are surprised at how down-to-earth I am. I like to stay home on Friday nights and listen to ‘The Art of Happiness’ by the Dalai Lama.” -Carmen Electra
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“All good art is an indiscretion.” -Tennessee Williams
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“Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.” -F. Scott Fitzgerald
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“Gossip is the art of saying nothing in a way that leaves practically nothing unsaid.” -Walter Winchell
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“Good manners is the art of making those people easy with whom we converse. Whoever makes the fewest people uneasy is the best bred in the room.” -Jonathan Swift
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“One science only will one genius fit so vast is art, so narrow human wit.” -Alexander Pope
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“The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.” -E. M. Forster
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“Art is an attempt to integrate evil.” -Simone de Beauvoir
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“The wealthy are always surrounded by hangers-on science and art are as well.” -Anton Chekhov
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“If thou art a master, be sometimes blind if a servant, sometimes deaf.” -Thomas Fuller
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“Mild autism can give you a genius like Einstein. If you have severe autism, you could remain nonverbal. You don’t want people to be on the severe end of the spectrum. But if you got rid of all the autism genetics, you wouldn’t have science or art. All you would have is a bunch of…
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“You have to master not only the art of listening to your head, you must also master listening to your heart and listening to your gut.” -Carly Fiorina
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“Memory is a great artist. For every man and for every woman it makes the recollection of his or her life a work of art and an unfaithful record.” -Andre Maurois
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“Like music and art, love of nature is a common language that can transcend political or social boundaries.” -Jimmy Carter
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“The first mistake of art is to assume that it’s serious.” -Lester Bangs
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“The youth of an art is, like the youth of anything else, its most interesting period. When it has come to the knowledge of good and evil it is stronger, but we care less about it.” -Samuel Butler
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“The greatness of art is not to find what is common but what is unique.” -Isaac Bashevis Singer
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“There is nothing, Sir, too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.” -Samuel Johnson
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“Diversity: the art of thinking independently together.” -Malcolm Forbes
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“Men’s magazines often feature pictures of naked ladies. Women’s magazines also often feature pictures of naked ladies. This is because the female body is a beautiful work of art, while the male body is hairy and lumpy and should not be seen by the light of day.” -Richard Roeper
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“What garlic is to salad, insanity is to art.” -Augustus Saint-Gaudens
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“The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can’t fake it… try to fake three laughs in an hour – ha ha ha ha ha – they’ll take you away, man. You can’t.” -Lenny Bruce
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“Architecture is the art of how to waste space.” -Philip Johnson
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“Courtesy is a silver lining around the dark clouds of civilization it is the best part of refinement and in many ways, an art of heroic beauty in the vast gallery of man’s cruelty and baseness.” -Bryant H. McGill
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“The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.” -John Ruskin
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“Diplomacy: the art of restraining power.” -Henry A. Kissinger
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“Criticism is the art of appraising others at one’s own value.” -George Jean Nathan
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“To do a dull thing with style-now that’s what I call art.” -Charles Bukowski
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“To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting in an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them.” -Elliott Erwitt
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“I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends, living like starving artists, and wonder, ‘Where’s the art?’ They weren’t doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do, so much fun to be had… maybe I could even quit renting.” -P. J. O’Rourke
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“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.” -Nathaniel Hawthorne
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“There is nothing in the world of art like the songs mother used to sing.” -Billy Sunday
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“People who don’t like me talk about it as though I’m trash because I have tattoos. I find that insane because it’s 2008, not the 1950s. Tattoos aren’t limited to sailors. It’s a form of art I find beautiful. I love it.” -Megan Fox
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“Music happens to be an art form that transcends language.” -Herbie Hancock
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“Art is man’s constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.” -Chinua Achebe
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“Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.” -Henry Miller
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“We are all hungry and thirsty for concrete images. Abstract art will have been good for one thing: to restore its exact virginity to figurative art.” -Salvador Dali
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“What can be more foolish than to think that all this rare fabric of heaven and earth could come by chance, when all the skill of art is not able to make an oyster!” -Anatole France
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“All humanity is passion without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual.” -Honore de Balzac
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“Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution. Employ it, and thou art wise be wise and thou art happy.” -Akhenaton
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“Art has the power to transform, to illuminate, to educate, inspire and motivate.” -Harvey Fierstein
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“The art of using deceit and cunning grow continually weaker and less effective to the user.” -John Tillotson
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“Parents are usually more careful to bestow knowledge on their children rather than virtue, the art of speaking well rather than doing well but their manners should be of the greatest concern.” -R. Buckminster Fuller
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“Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike.” -Margot Fonteyn
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“Really I don’t like human nature unless all candied over with art.” -Virginia Woolf
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“O, thou art fairer than the evening air clad in the beauty of a thousand stars.” -Christopher Marlowe
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“It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar – that I call an achievement.” -Horace
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“I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.” -Walt Whitman
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“The momentous thing in human life is the art of winning the soul to good or evil.” -Francis Bacon
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“The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.” -William Blake
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“Listen to your inner-voice: Surround yourself with loving, nurturing people. Fall in love with your art and find yourself. Music is the great communicator.” -Glenn Hughes
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“Winners have the ability to step back from the canvas of their lives like an artist gaining perspective. They make their lives a work of art – an individual masterpiece.” -Denis Waitley
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“The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.” -Lord Byron
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“It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art.” -Walter Hagen
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“If we know the divine art of concentration, if we know the divine art of meditation, if we know the divine art of contemplation, easily and consciously we can unite the inner world and the outer world.” -Sri Chinmoy
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“Creative without strategy is called ‘art.’ Creative with strategy is called ‘advertising.’” -Jef I. Richards
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“All things are artificial, for nature is the art of God.” -Thomas Browne
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“Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one.” -Stella Adler
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“I am a poor man and of little worth, who is laboring in that art that God has given me in order to extend my life as long as possible.” -Michelangelo
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