Graffiti Art Quotes

There are four basic human needs; food, sleep, sex and revenge. ~ Banksy

Poetic Terrorism
WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they're the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune--say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. ...
Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places (public or private) where you have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual experience, etc.
Go naked for a sign.
Organize a strike in your school or workplace on the grounds that it does not satisfy your need for indolence & spiritual beauty.
Graffiti-art loaned some grace to ugly subways & rigid public monuments--PT-art can also be created for public places: poems scrawled in courthouse lavatories, small fetishes abandoned in parks & restaurants, Xerox-art under windshield-wipers of parked cars, Big Character Slogans pasted on playground walls, anonymous letters mailed to random or chosen recipients (mail fraud), pirate radio transmissions, wet cement...
The audience reaction or aesthetic-shock produced by PT ought to be at least as strong as the emotion of terror-- powerful disgust, sexual arousal, superstitious awe, sudden intuitive break ~ Hakim Bey

The art of cartooning is vulgarity. The only reason for cartooning to exist is to be on the edge. If you only take apart what they allow you to take apart, you're Disney. Cartooning is a low-class, for-the-public art, just like graffiti art and rap music. Vulgar but believable, that's the line I kept walking. ~ Ralph Bakshi

In Afghanistan I was doing street art because it was more open, but when I had a show, only men would come. I said, I'm an artist not only for men, but for women too. So that's why I like graffiti. ~ Malina Suliman

Nothing in the world is more common than unsuccessful people with talent, leave the house before you find something worth staying in for. ~ Banksy

The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little. ~ Banksy

Artist Allen Crawford brings Whitman's undying text to new life in gorgeous hand-lettering and illustrations, transforming the 60-page poem originally published in 1855 as the centerpiece of Leaves of Grass into a breathtaking 256-page piece of art. ~ Maria Popova

Love art in yourself, not yourself in art. ~ Konstantin Stanislavski

An art aims, above all, at producing something beautiful which affects not our feelings but the organ of pure contemplation, our imagination. ~ Eduard Hanslick

I just love pretty things, whether it is art, a song or a pair of shoes. ~ Rita Ora

Each sensation is precious, protect it, cherish it, keep it. Never give it away. You must develop that balance which allows all of the world to come in to you, and only that which you have expressed in your art to move back out again into the world. ~ Robert Henri

He wasn't good or evil or cruel or extreme in any way but one, which was that he had elevated grayness to the status of a fine art and cultivated a mind that was as bleak and pitiless and logical as the slopes of Hell. ~ Terry Pratchett

Yet, for I know thou art religious
And hast a thing within thee called conscience,
With twenty popish tricks and ceremonies
Which I have seen thee careful to observe,
Therefore I urge thy oath; for that I know
An idiot holds his bauble for a god
And keeps the oath which by that god he swears,
To that I'll urge him: therefore thou shalt vow
By that same god, what god soe'er it be,
That thou adorest and hast in reverence,
To save my boy, to nourish and bring him up,
Or else I will discover naught to thee. ~ William Shakespeare

Aristotle is the last Greek philosopher who faces the world cheerfully; after him, all have, in one form or another, a philosophy of retreat. The world is bad; let us learn to be independent of it. External goods are precarious; they are the gift of fortune, not the reward of our own efforts. Only subjective goods - virtue, or contentment through resignation - are secure, and these alone, therefore, will be valued by the wise man. Diogenes personally was a man full of vigour, but his doctrine, like all those of the Hellenistic age, was one to appeal to weary men, in whom disappointment had destroyed natural zest. And it was certainly not a doctrine calculated to promote art or science or statesmanship, or any useful activity except one of protest against powerful evil. ~ Anonymous

Thus, seeking to produce a typology of forms of the art of government, La Mothe Le Vayer, in a text from the following century (consisting of educational writings intended for the French Dauphin), says that there are three fundamental types of government, each of which relates to a particular science or discipline: the art of self-government, connected with morality; the art of properly governing a family, which belongs to economy; and finally the science of ruling the state, which concerns politics. What matters, notwithstanding this typology, is that the art of government is always characterized by the essential continuity of one type with the other, and of second type with the third. ~ Michel Foucault

When he got to the afterlife, after that particular Polish life, Milo found that Suzie had a perfect copy of the entire pornography collection.
"You risked your life for this?" she asked.
The expressions on her face were dramatic and varied widely. Some of the drawings and photographs were quite surprising. Some of them involved ponies.
"When people try to destroy art or thought," Milo explained, "it makes all forms of art and thought valuable. It's a slippery slope once we start saying what people should or shouldn't use. It's a real evil, a thing with substance and power. I was helping to preserve people's chance to see and to choose."
"I see," she whispered. "I understand."
For a solid month, every time he turned around she had one of those books open.
"I'm fighting evil." she'd say.
"Rozumiem," he'd answer, in Polish. "I understand. ~ Michael Poore

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say. ~ Henri Matisse

Philosophy is based on speculation, on logic, on thought, on the synthesis of what we know and on the analysis of what we do not know. Philosophy must include within its confines the whole content of science, religion and art. ~ P.D. Ouspensky

Art is unthinkable without risk and spiritual self-sacrifice. ~ Boris Pasternak

Street photography is art and if art is a crime, please God, forgive me. ~ Thomas Leuthard

Friends? Your friends? If you lock them together in a room with no food for a week ... Then you could see what it is, friends! ... ~ Art Spiegelman

A moment where heaven kisses earth and time is left to float away. ~ Jenim Dibie

In the arts, people are always waiting for someone or some movement to "fulfill her/its/his promise." Then, half-a-dozen or a dozen years on, others begin to realize that, really, something extraordinary was actually happening. ~ Samuel R. Delany

In religion, as in art and science, there are - in addition to times of great excitement - times of sober work and practice. Interaction with God must be practiced; otherwise we will not find the right tone, the right word, the right language, when he surprises us. We must learn God's language, laboriously learn it. And we must work at it, so that we will be able to talk with him. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I was so impressed with the work we were doing and I was very involved ideologically in photography - that I arranged an exhibition at the College Art Association. The first exhibition I picked the photographs and so on and we had an exhibition in New York. ~ Ben Shahn

To live in the world of creation - to get into it and stay in it - to frequent it and haunt it - to think intently and fruitfully - to woo combinations and inspirations into being by a depth and continuity of attention and meditation - this is the only thing - and I neglect it, far and away too much; from indolence, from vagueness, from inattention, and from a strange nervous fear of letting myself go. If I can vanquish that nervousness, the world is mine. ~ Henry James

Ultimately I want my metal in a bar and not an art gallery. ~ Mat McNerney

McMansions in sprawling suburbs, without mountains of unnecessary packaging, without giant mechanized monofarms, without energy-hogging big-box stores, without electronic billboards, without endless piles of throwaway junk, without the overconsumption of consumer goods no one really needs is not an impoverished world. I disagree with those environmentalists who say we are going to have to make do with less. In fact, we are going to make do with more: more beauty, more community, more fulfillment, more art, more music, and material objects that are fewer in number but superior in utility and aesthetics. The cheap stuff that fills our lives today, however great its quantity, can only cheapen life. ~ Charles Eisenstein

In art, religion, and politics the respect must be mutual, no matter how violent the disagreement. ~ Vincent Price

In making tactical dispositions, the highest pitch you can attain is to conceal them ~ Sun Tzu

If thy words are wise, they will not seem so to the foolish: if they are deep the shallow will not appreciate them. Think not highly of thyself, then, when thou art praised by many. ~ John Lancaster Spalding

Life is not only full of sound and fury. It also has butterflies, flowers, art. ~ Claude Simon

The greatest art comes out of warmth and conviction and deep feeling, but then, very few people, even geniuses, have all that. ~ Katherine Anne Porter

Anyone having to do with medicine will have looked at Frank Netter's art work ... I decided I would make him my model ... getting my degree in medical illustration and then going on to medical school. ~ David Bolinsky

The Australian Gerald Murnane, a genius on the level of Beckett, is known in Australia and Sweden but almost nowhere else. And I loved Reality Hunger, David Shields' recent novel take on the art of the novel. ~ Teju Cole

American musicians, instead of investigating ragtime, attempt to ignore it, or dismiss it with a contemptuous word. But that has always been the course of scholasticism in every branch of art. Whatever new thing the 'people' like is poohpoohed; whatever is 'popular' is spoken of as not worth the while. The fact is, nothing great or enduring, especially in music, has ever sprung full-fledged and unprecedented from the brain of any master; the best that he gives to the world he gathers from the hearts of the people, and runs it through the alembic of his genius. ~ James Weldon Johnson

I believe that while art is always beyond morality, it is never above it. ~ Jennifer Stone

As it is a great point of art, when our matter requires it, to enlarge and veer out all sail, so to take it in and contract it is of no less praise when the argument doth ask it. ~ Ben Jonson

I'm all about supporting anyone whose art is also the way they make their living. ~ Jessica Alba

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence. ~ Sam Taylor-Johnson

Well, of
course one must have concentration. Courage. Self-control. That goes
without saying. But more important than these, one must have ... I
don't know how to say it. One must be both a mathematician and a
poet. As though poetry were a science; or mathematics an art. One
must have an affection for proportion to play Go at all well.Ah ... what Go is to philosophers
and warriors, chess is to accountants and merchants. ~ Trevanian

Chemists are, on the whole, like physicists, only 'less so'.They don't make quite the same wonderful mistakes, and much what they do is an art, related to cooking, instead of a true science. They have their moments, and their sources of legitimate pride. They don't split atoms, as the physicists do. They join them together, and a very praiseworthy activity that is. ~ Anthony Standen

The Sun Tzu School (which wrote the Art of War) surely never imagined that their antiwar, pro-empire treatise would become known and accepted after the fall of the first empire as a text on military tactics. Likewise, they would have been surprised to see the Ping-fa military metaphor - an inspired teaching device - come to be seen as the message and not the medium. ~ David G. Jones

I go to art more as something that's going to give me some clue as to how to live your life, or an angle on life that's going to interest me. Human beings haven't changed that much over the centuries, so I'm not really bothered what period it comes from. ~ Penguin Classics

After sex & metaphysics, -
… what?

What you have made. ~ Frank Bidart