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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“Eloquence, n. The art of orally persuading fools that white is the color that it appears to be. It includes the gift of making any color appear white.” -Ambrose Bierce
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“All architecture is great architecture after sunset perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.” -Gilbert K. Chesterton
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“Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.” -Edmund Burke
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“In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects.” -Rabindranath Tagore
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“Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes them no art can keep or acquire them.” -Blaise Pascal
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“A race is a work of art that people can look at and be affected in as many ways they’re capable of understanding.” -Steve Prefontaine
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“The art of leadership is saying no, not saying yes. It is very easy to say yes.” -Tony Blair
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“In seeking wisdom thou art wise in imagining that thou hast attained it – thou art a fool.” -Lord Chesterfield
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“Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.” -Malcolm Muggeridge
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“Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full, that thou mayest be filled with that whereof thou art empty.” -Saint Augustine
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“Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.” -Pablo Picasso
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“If thou art a man, admire those who attempt great things, even though they fail.” -Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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“No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.” -Rainer Maria Rilke
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“The art of life is to live in the present moment, and to make that moment as perfect as we can by the realization that we are the instruments and expression of God Himself.” -Emmet Fox
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“The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.” -Orson Welles
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“Only through art can we emerge from ourselves and know what another person sees.” -Marcel Proust
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“Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.” -Stanislaw Lec
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“Art never improves, but… the material of art is never quite the same.” -T. S. Eliot
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“Being an artist is dragging your innermost feelings out, giving a piece of yourself, no matter in which art form, in which medium.” -Henry Rollins
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“The challenge is to practice politics as the art of making what appears to be impossible, possible.” -Hillary Clinton
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“The art of living well and the art of dying well are one.” -Epicurus
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“A great city, whose image dwells in the memory of man, is the type of some great idea. Rome represents conquest Faith hovers over the towers of Jerusalem and Athens embodies the pre-eminent quality of the antique world, Art.” -Benjamin Disraeli
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“All in the Family was intellectual it was art.” -Carroll O’Connor
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“What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter – a soothing, calming influence on the mind, rather like a good armchair which provides relaxation from physical fatigue.” -Henri Matisse
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“Freedom in art, freedom in society, this is the double goal towards which all consistent and logical minds must strive.” -Victor Hugo
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“To my mind the old masters are not art their value is in their scarcity.” -Thomas A. Edison
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“I went into the business for the money, and the art grew out of it. If people are disillusioned by that remark, I can’t help it. It’s the truth.” -Charlie Chaplin
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“The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science.” -Erich Fromm
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“We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question.” -Paulo Coelho
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“Ethics is in origin the art of recommending to others the sacrifices required for cooperation with oneself.” -Bertrand Russell
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“Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I’ve a call.” -Sylvia Plath
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“Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the…
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“Life doesn’t imitate art, it imitates bad television.” -Woody Allen
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“The person who knows one thing and does it better than anyone else, even if it only be the art of raising lentils, receives the crown he merits. If he raises all his energy to that end, he is a benefactor of mankind and its rewarded as such.” -Og Mandino
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“To array a man’s will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.” -Henry Ward Beecher
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“When thou art above measure angry, bethink thee how momentary is man’s life.” -Marcus Aurelius
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“Art is making something out of nothing and selling it.” -Frank Zappa
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“All married couples should learn the art of battle as they should learn the art of making love. Good battle is objective and honest – never vicious or cruel. Good battle is healthy and constructive, and brings to a marriage the principles of equal partnership.” -Ann Landers
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“The web, then, or the pattern, a web at once sensuous and logical, an elegant and pregnant texture: that is style, that is the foundation of the art of literature.” -Robert Louis Stevenson
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“The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.” -Aldous Huxley
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“The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.” -Ulysses S. Grant
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“I think most of the people involved in any art always secretly wonder whether they are really there because they’re good or there because they’re lucky.” -Katharine Hepburn
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“You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.” -Napoleon Bonaparte
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“It is after all the greatest art to limit and isolate oneself.” -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Art is not a handicraft, it is the transmission of feeling the artist has experienced.” -Leo Tolstoy
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“Religion is the masterpiece of the art of animal training, for it trains people as to how they shall think.” -Arthur Schopenhauer
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“Music is the art of the prophets and the gift of God.” -Martin Luther
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“In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy’s country whole and intact to shatter and destroy it is not so good.” -Sun Tzu
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“The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.” -Leonardo da Vinci
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“Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.” -Laurence J. Peter
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“I never called my work an ‘art’. It’s part of show business, the business of building entertainment.” -Walt Disney
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“Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.” -Paul Hawken
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“Art is always and everywhere the secret confession, and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.” -Karl Marx
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“Art is not a treasure in the past or an importation from another land, but part of the present life of all living and creating peoples.” -Franklin D. Roosevelt
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“Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.” -Albert Camus
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“The art of government is the organisation of idolatry.” -George Bernard Shaw
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“Motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower
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“The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature cures the disease.” -Voltaire
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“Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don’t have for something they don’t need.” -Will Rogers
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“Sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. There is a time for silence. A time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. And a time to prepare to pick up the pieces when it’s all over.” -Octavia Butler
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“We’re going to shoot one Polaroid per show. I’m going to sign this before it even develops because I know that once it develops with my signature on it, it’s worth a fortune. I’ll make this a work of magic warlock art.” -Charlie Sheen
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“My goal is to be one with the music. I just dedicate my whole life to this art.” -Jimi Hendrix
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“Love isn’t an emotion or an instinct – it’s an art.” -Mae West
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“Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.” -H. L. Mencken
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“I started to make a study of the art of war and revolution and, whilst abroad, underwent a course in military training. If there was to be guerrilla warfare, I wanted to be able to stand and fight with my people and to share the hazards of war with them.” -Nelson Mandela
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“Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honor.” -Ernest Hemingway
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“It is Homer who has chiefly taught other poets the art of telling lies skillfully.” -Aristotle
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“The bad gains respect through imitation, the good loses it especially in art.” -Friedrich Nietzsche
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“It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.” -Anais Nin
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“Well, Art is Art, isn’t it? Still, on the other hand, water is water. And east is east and west is west and if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does. Now you tell me what you know.” -Groucho Marx
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“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.’ The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of ‘Artist.’” -Edgar Allan Poe
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“Envy is the art of counting the other fellow’s blessings instead of your own.” -Harold Coffin
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“Politics is the art of controlling your environment.” -Hunter S. Thompson
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“Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.” -Robert Frost
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“What we have to do, what at any rate it is our duty to do, is to revive the old art of Lying.” -Oscar Wilde
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“I wash my hands of those who imagine chattering to be knowledge, silence to be ignorance, and affection to be art.” -Khalil Gibran
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“There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” -William Shakespeare
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“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” -William James
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“The art of love is largely the art of persistence.” -Albert Ellis
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“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.” -John F. Kennedy
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“Speak the truth, do not yield to anger give, if thou art asked for little by these three steps thou wilt go near the gods.” -Confucius
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“A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.” -Eugene Ionesco
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“The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.” -Benjamin Franklin
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“Procrastination is the art of keeping up with yesterday.” -Don Marquis
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“I think in art, but especially in films, people are trying to confirm their own existences.” -Jim Morrison
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“If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that… I believe in what I do, and I’ll say it.” -John Lennon
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“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” -John W. Gardner
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“It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.” -Albert Einstein
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“Love of beauty is taste. The creation of beauty is art.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson
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“The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.” -George Edward Moore
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“I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue, but I’ve done many.” -Robert Indiana
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“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.” -C. S. Lewis
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“The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“Be true to yourself, help others, make each day your masterpiece, make friendship a fine art, drink deeply from good books – especially the Bible, build a shelter against a rainy day, give thanks for your blessings and pray for guidance every day.” -John Wooden
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“Be slow to fall into friendship but when thou art in, continue firm and constant.” -Socrates
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“It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.” -Henry Moore
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“Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.” -Edward Steichen
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“Art in Nature is rhythmic and has a horror of constraint.” -Robert Delaunay
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“Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.” -Robert Smithson
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“If a building becomes architecture, then it is art.” -Arne Jacobsen
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“Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.” -Louis Kahn
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“Murals in restaurants are on a par with the food in museums.” -Peter De Vries
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“The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.” -Ellen Key
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“When I make art, I think about its ability to connect with others, to bring them into the process.” -Jim Hodges
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“You begin with the possibilities of the material.” -Robert Rauschenberg
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“Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.” -Thomas Wolfe
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“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance and I know of no substitute whatever for the force and beauty of its process.” -Max Eastman
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“Art ought never to be considered except in its relations with its ideal beauty.” -Alfred de Vigny
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“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
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“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.” -Paul Gauguin
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“The principle of art is to pause, not bypass.” -Jerzy Kosinski
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“Mournful and yet grand is the destiny of the artist.” -Franz Liszt
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“The artist’s world is limitless. It can be found anywhere, far from where he lives or a few feet away. It is always on his doorstep.” -Paul Strand
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“Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.” -Anish Kapoor
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“Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers – and never succeeding.” -Gian Carlo Menotti
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“The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness.” -Joan Miro
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“Trying to force creativity is never good.” -Sarah McLachlan
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“Beauty in art is often nothing but ugliness subdued.” -Jean Rostand
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“Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.” -John Ciardi
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“Art is an invention of aesthetics, which in turn is an invention of philosophers… What we call art is a game.” -Octavio Paz
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“The artist who aims at perfection in everything achieves it in nothing.” -Eugene Delacroix
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“I think an artist’s responsibility is more complex than people realize.” -Jodie Foster
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“A painting that is well composed is half finished.” -Pierre Bonnard
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“The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.” -Henri Cartier-Bresson
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“To make pictures big is to make them more powerful.” -Robert Mapplethorpe
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“I’ve never really had a hobby, unless you count art, which the IRS once told me I had to declare as a hobby since I hadn’t made money with it.” -Laurie Anderson
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“An artist is never ahead of his time but most people are far behind theirs.” -Edgard Varese
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“My love of fine art increased – the more of it I saw, the more of it I wanted to see.” -Paul Getty
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“Art doesn’t transform. It just plain forms.” -Roy Lichtenstein
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“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
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“My hand is the extension of the thinking process – the creative process.” -Tadao Ando
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“That’s the motivation of an artist – to seek attention of some kind.” -James Taylor
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“Art hurts. Art urges voyages – and it is easier to stay at home.” -Gwendolyn Brooks
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“By the work one knows the workman.” -Jean de La Fontaine
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“Art is the daughter of freedom.” -Friedrich Schiller
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“Lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.” -Igor Stravinsky
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“The artist belongs to his work, not the work to the artist.” -Novalis
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“Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos.” -Stephen Sondheim
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“Art is a revolt against fate. All art is a revolt against man’s fate.” -Andre Malraux
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“Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail.” -Theodore Dreiser
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“I don’t think there’s any artist of any value who doesn’t doubt what they’re doing.” -Francis Ford Coppola
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“Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.” -Harry S. Truman
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“My imagination can picture no fairer happiness than to continue living for art.” -Clara Schumann
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“To send light into the darkness of men’s hearts – such is the duty of the artist.” -Robert Schumann
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“Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.” -William Wordsworth
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“Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.” -Lionel Trilling
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“What makes photography a strange invention is that its primary raw materials are light and time.” -John Berger
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“All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster’s autobiography.” -Federico Fellini
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“The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.” -Hendrik Willem Van Loon
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“Life is painting a picture, not doing a sum.” -Oliver Wendell Holmes
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“Abstract art: a product of the untalented sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.” -Al Capp
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“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” -Emile Zola
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“I don’t want to be interesting. I want to be good.” -Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
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“Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.” -Dorothea Lange
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“Every production of an artist should be the expression of an adventure of his soul.” -W. Somerset Maugham
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“A good painting to me has always been like a friend. It keeps me company, comforts and inspires.” -Hedy Lamarr
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“The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure.” -Dale Carnegie
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“Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.” -Fran Lebowitz
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“Every human is an artist. The dream of your life is to make beautiful art.” -Miguel Angel Ruiz
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“The very essence of the creative is its novelty, and hence we have no standard by which to judge it.” -Carl Rogers
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“Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.” -Twyla Tharp
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“I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way – things I had no words for.” -Georgia O’Keeffe
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“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
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“The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.” -Abraham Lincoln
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“Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.” -Winston Churchill
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“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” -Thomas Merton
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“This world is but a canvas to our imagination.” -Henry David Thoreau
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“An artist is not paid for his labor but for his vision.” -James Whistler
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“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.” -Scott Adams
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