African Art Quotes

In the last 20 years of collecting contemporary African art, I have been bombarded by incredible shapes and colors that I now want to translate into clothes. ~ Jean Pigozzi

African art is functional, it serves a purpose. It's not a dormant. It's not a means to collect the largest cheering section. It should be healing, a source a joy. Spreading positive vibrations. ~ Mos Def

In the USA, we learn "art history" as Western art history, and the history of Asian, or African art is a special case; we learn politics by examining our own government system, and consider other systems special cases, and the same is true of philosophy. ~ Jay L. Garfield

They do not like to hear such expressions as "Negro literature," "Negro poetry," "African art," or "thinking black"; and, roughly speaking, we must concede that such things do not exist. These things did not figure in the courses which they pursued in school, and why should they? "Aren't we all Americans? Then, whatever is American is as much the heritage of the Negro as of any other group in ~ Carter G. Woodson

Robert Farris Thompson, America's most prominent historian of African art, says that funky is derived from the Ki-Kongo lu-fuki, meaning "positive sweat" of the sort you get from dancing or having sex, but not working. One's mojo, which has to be "working" to attract a lover, is Ki-Kongo for "soul." Boogie comes from mbugi, meaning "devilishly good." And both jazz and jism likely derive from dinza, the Ki-Kongo word for "to ejaculate. ~ Christopher Ryan

Above Constance's desk were nude photographs of women in 1930s France, draped in provocative poses. She had put them there for Bob's viewing pleasure and in return he had placed African art of naked men above his desk for her. ~ Cecelia Ahern

Time is a slave,
existence is a servant,
reality is a master,
and eternity is queen.

Fate is a slave,
light is a servant,
nature is a master,
and immortality is king.

Mankind is a slave,
knowledge is a servant,
wisdom is a master,
and enlightenment is queen.

The past is a slave,
the present is a servant,
the future is a master,
and God is king, ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

The art of becoming 'rich', in the common sense, is not absolutely nor finally the art of accumulating much money for ourselves, but also of contriving that our neighbour shall have less. In accurate terms, it is 'the art of establishing the maximum inequality in your own favour'. ~ John Ruskin

When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and only then may it be a source of enchantment. ~ Samuel Beckett

If I ever have to cast an acting role, I want the wrong person for the part. I can never visualize the right person in a part. The right person for the right part would be too much. Besides, no person is every completely right for any part, because part in a role is never real, so if you can't get someone who's perfectly right, it's more satisfying to get someone who's perfectly wrong. Then you know you've really got something. ~ Andy Warhol

I do not have many things that are meaningful to me. Except my doubts and my fears. And my art. ~ Chaim Potok

Book-jacket design may become a lost art, like album-cover design, without which late-20th-century iconography would have been pauperized. ~ James Wolcott

When you fall in love with a work of art, you'd die to meet the artist. I am a student of the galleries of Pacific sunsets, full moon rises on the ocean, the clouds from an airplane, autumn forests in Raleigh, first fallen snows.
And I'm dying to meet the artist. ~ Yasmin Mogahed

i love art. to experience somebodys art is to be invited into a silent conversation they are having with themselves. ~ Jomny Sun

Tell him why I didn't stop, Marcus." The art dealer sighed. "You never said anything about butterflies, you moron. ~ Joey W. Hill

This is a fact. If you don't make art people like, you will never earn a living as an artist. ~ Jack White

I've been circling the wagons down at Times Square, trying to fill up this hole in my soul but nothing fits in there. ~ John Hiatt

The art of civil conversation begins at birth. Then goes from the dinner table to the schoolroom, to interaction among friends, to the work place, and on to other places where all manner of social interactions are required. ~ Cindy Ann Peterson

People enquire as to the craft behind our art and we reply by making references to a patently childish notion. ~ Jay Sankey

The great tragedy is that they're removing art completely, not because they're putting more science in, but because they can't afford the art teachers or because somebody thinks it's not useful. An enlightened society has all of this going on within it. It's part of what distinguishes what it is to be human from other life forms on Earth - that we have culture ~ Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I feel this society somewhere has lost its sense of what art is. Art is expression. In expression, you need 100% full freedom and our freedom to express our art is seriously being fucked with. Fuck, the word 'fuck' has many connotations as does the word 'art'. ~ Kurt Cobain

Diplomacy may very well be the art of manipulating secrets. What would any negotiation come to, were not there secrets to either share or withhold? ~ Robin Hobb

If social protest is antithetical to art, what then shall we make of Goya, Dickens, and Twain? ~ Ralph Ellison

...but nature scants that lights in all it makes, working in much the manner of a painter who knows the true art, but those whose brush hand shakes. ~ Dante Alighieri

The trout in yonder wimpling burn - That glides, a silver dart, - And, safe beneath the shady thorn, - Defies the anglers art ... ~ Robert Burns

The art of teaching is clarity and the art of learning is to listen. ~ Vandana Shiva

It is such an agreeable feeling to be busy with something one is only half-competent to do that nobody should criticize the dilettante for taking up an art he will never learn, or blame the artist who leaves the territory of his own art for the pleasure of trying himself in a neighbouring one. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal. ~ Steven Pinker

A citizen is no greater than his ideology,
no cleverer than his intellect,
no nobler than his aspirations,
and no stronger than his opinions.

A nation is no greater than its consciousness,
no richer than its heritage,
no grander than its potential,
and no loftier than its luminaries.

The world is no greater than its leaders,
no smarter than its teachers,
no better than its preachers,
and no higher than its philosophers. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

There are always going to be people that are judgmental that are going to say, 'Well, he was an actor first, so he doesn't have the right to be a musician,' or, 'I know him as this, so therefore I will never accept him as that.' I can't change those people. I can only be myself. And I can only keep making art. I can only do the best that I can. I am not going to spend my life trying to silence the critics. I'm going to do what I'm passionate about and follow my dreams. ~ Jared Leto

There was no point in doing art if you were going to be second-rate. ~ Christopher Bram

John saw only the linen cloths. He, Peter, also saw the linen cloths because we [Gentiles] do not reject the Old Testament, for as Luke says, "Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures" (Lk 24:45). But in addition Peter saw the napkin which had been on his head: "The head of Christ is God" (1 Cor 11:3). Thus to see the napkin which had been on the head of Jesus is to have faith in the divinity of Christ, which the Jews refused to accept. This napkin is described as not lying with the linen cloths, and rolled up, having a place by itself, because the divinity of Christ is covered over, and it is apart from every creature because of its excellence: "God who is over all be blessed for ever" (Rom 9:5); "Truly, you art a God who hides yourself" (Is 45:15). ~ Thomas Aquinas

Photography is just a medium. It's like a typewriter. Photography as an art doesn't interest me an awful lot; as a participant, though I like to look at it. ~ Ezra Stoller

Art does what reality cannot. ~ Jayme K.

Absurdity and anti - absurdity are the two poles of creative energy. ~ Karl Lagerfeld

I shot a quick look at Logan to see how he reacted to that news and was met by the golden eyes of a Cheetah, sitting calmly on his chair. I guess I would have played animal charades if I could have, too, but it was hard to gauge the emotional reactions of an African predator. Liz ~ April White

All the history of the stage is a struggle, the gasping of a beautiful child born at the point of death. The moralists, censorship and oppression, technology, and now poverty have all tried to destroy her. Only we, the actors and audiences, have kept her alive. ~ Gene Wolfe

OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio's genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth. ~ Nick Flynn

Artists who have won fame are often embarrassed by it; thus their first works are often their best. ~ Ludwig Van Beethoven

Art has the power to transform, to illuminate, to educate, inspire and motivate. ~ Harvey Fierstein

When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. "Real artists sign their work," he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh. No one would ever see them, but the members of the team knew that their signatures were inside, just as they knew that the circuit board was laid out as elegantly as possible. Jobs called them each up by name, one at a time. Burrell Smith went first. Jobs waited until last, after all forty-five of the others. He found a place right in the center of the sheet and signed his name in lowercase letters with a grand flair. Then he toasted them with champagne. "With moments like this, he got us seeing our work as art," said Atkinson. ~ Walter Isaacson

Art isn't life, you know. It if were, the world would go up in flames. It's artifice. By definition.
("Talking In The Dark") ~ Dennis Etchison

If you want to create something that's worth doing you have to self-edit from the get-go. You really must be careful and selective with whom you work, you must constantly ask yourself the hard questions about your art, and you must set a nearly unattainable standard for yourself. ~ John Dyer Baizley

All great art has madness, and quite a lot of bad art has it, too. ~ William, Saroyan

Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry. ~ Julian Barnes

Untrained warriors are soon killed on the battlefield; so also persons untrained in the art of preserving their inner peace are quickly riddled by the bullets of worry and restlessness in active life. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

Connoisseurs think the art is already done. ~ John Constable

We worship the aesthetic, but we do not have faith in it. ~ Mason Cooley

The function of art is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before. ~ Susanne Katherina Langer

O call not me to justify the wrong, That thy unkindness lays upon my heart, Wound me not with thine eye but with thy tongue, Use power with power, and slay me not by art, ... ~ William Shakespeare

The struggle of the artist against the art-ideology, against the creative impulse and even against his own work also shows itself in his attitude towards success and fame; these two phenomena are but an extension, socially, of the process which began subjectively with the vocation and creation of the personal ego to be an artist. In this entire creative process, which begins with self-nomination as artist and ends in the fame of posterity, two fundamental tendencies - one might almost say, two personalities of the individual - are in continual conflict throughout: one wants to eternalize itself in artistic creation, the other in ordinary life - in brief, immortal man vs. the immortal soul of man. ~ Otto Rank