Letter Art Quotes

Where was I? in remarking that me is the envelopes and not nearly so much so, the often foolish letters inside. ~ Edward Gorey

I feel the art world in New York has a stronger following than Britain. If you go to a New York art district on a Saturday morning, it will be so busy with families and openings - art is much more ingrained in the culture. ~ Sam Taylor-Wood

I think my masks reference artists who reference primitivism. They're not directly connected to tribal arts. I think they look more like third-grade art projects. ~ Mark Grotjahn

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it. ~ Ernst Fischer

I visited the Museum of Modern Art and viewed the exhibition of Picasso's sculptures, and I couldn't help but think about what it would be like to have a room full of school children explore Picasso's approach to making art. ~ Jerry Pinkney

I think, for some artists, the fear of taking on a political identity stems from not wanting to be pigeonholed as political actor or a political musician. It becomes this thing where somehow your art can no longer exist on its own and be multifaceted. ~ Carrie Brownstein

Just as that puzzled savage who has picked up - a strange cast-up from the ocean? - something unearthed from the sands? - or an obscure object fallen down from the sky? - intricate in curves, it gleams first dully and then with a bright thrust of light. Just as he turns it this way and that, turns it over, trying to discover what to do with it, trying to discover some mundane function within his own grasp, never dreaming of its higher function.

So also we, holding Art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters; boldly we direct it, we renew, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement - right down to popular songs and night-clubs, and at another - grabbing the nearest weapon, cork or cudgel - for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives to us a part of its secret inner light. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The late Seventies was the death of the manufacturing age in the United States. It was also a time when the Pictures Generation artists were getting started. They co-opted the language of advertising. The factory disappeared, and weirdly, so did the art object - it was the age of making gestures, not objects. ~ Rachel Kushner

In a lot of the art world, you have to present yourself as you know what you're doing at a young age. Music gave me another outlet. The 'no wave' bands were such an inspiration; it felt so free - once you start doing it, it's hard to stop. But I can't get away from art. It comes back around. I wouldn't be true to myself if I didn't pursue it. ~ Kim Gordon

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I don't have two lives. This is one life, and the personal pictures and the assignment work are all part of it. ~ Annie Leibovitz

But no artist, I now realize, can be satisfied with art alone. There is a natural craving for recognition which cannot be gain-said. ~ Agatha Christie

Art is not cozy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing. ~ Iris Murdoch

If we marvel at the artist who has written a great book, we must marvel more at those people whose lives are works of art and who don't even know it, who wouldn't believe it if they were told. However hard work good writing may be, it is easier than good living. ~ Katherine Paterson

Artistic talent is far more common than the talent to nurture artistic talent. Any parent with a hard hand can crush it, but to nurture it is much more difficult. ~ Stephen King

The maker movement is mostly about building things (whether low-tech or high-tech), as well as creating art and music. But it's driven by project-based, peer-to-peer learning, which tends to happen as novice "makers ~ Warren Berger

Nothing in Art is achieved by will alone. It is achieved by docilely submitting to the subconscious. ~ Odilon Redon

Even music can't compete with the canyons and waterfalls. ~ Marty Rubin

He has made a profession out of a business and an art out of a profession. ~ Clifton Fadiman

You might say that a creative person is a person who simply has a desire to have something, to add something to the world that's not there yet, and goes about arranging fort that to happen ... when you desire a work of art and make it, you've added to the stock of art in the world. Artists are one of the people who can do that: add to the stock of things. ~ Carl Andre

The principle of painting is also to make a choice. "Even genius," writes Delacroix, ruminating on his art,
"is only the gift of generalizing and choosing." The painter isolates his subject, which is the first way of
unifying it. Landscapes flee, vanish from the memory, or destroy one another. That is why the landscape
painter or the painter of still life isolates in space and time things that normally change with the light, get
lost in an infinite perspective, or disappear under the impact of other values. The first thing that a
landscape painter does is to square off his canvas. He eliminates as much as he includes. ~ Albert Camus

Art is the most general condition of the Past in the present ... Perhaps no work of art is art. It can only become art, when it is part of the past. In this normative sense, a 'contemporary' work of art would be a contradiction - except so far as we can, in the present, assimilate the present to the past. ~ Susan Sontag

What is thy thought? There is no miracle?
There is a great one, which thou hast not read,
And never shalt escape. Thyself, O man,
Thou art the miracle. Ay, thou thyself,
Being in the world and of the world, thyself,
Hast breathed in breath from Him that made the world.
Thou art thy Father's copy of Himself,
Thou art thy Father's miracle. ~ Jean Ingelow

Art is theft. - Pablo Picasso ~ Anonymous

If all the thought which had been expended on the construction of engines of agony and death - the modes of aggression and defence, the raising of armies, and the acquirement of those arts of tyranny and falsehood without which mixed multitudes could neither be led nor governed - had been employed to promote the true welfare and extend the real empire of man, how different would have been the present situation of human society! ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley

Logic rests on the axiom that existence exists. Logic is the art of non-contradictory identification. ~ Ayn Rand

Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine. ~ Yann Martel

Every good piece of art ... involves first essentially the evidence of human skill, and the formation of an actually beautiful thing by it. ~ John Ruskin

Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual. ~ Andrei Tarkovsky

A mere chronicle of observed events will produce only journalism; combined with a sensitive memory, it can produce art. ~ Hallie Burnett

Things look one way and then they look another way. ~ Art Hochberg

I am, myself, a very poor visualizer and find that I can seldom call to mind even a single letter of the alphabet in purely retinal terms. I must trace the letter by running my mental eye over its contour in order that the image of it shall leave any distinctness at all. ~ William James

The art of cookery is the art of poisoning mankind, by rendering the appetite still importunate, when the wants of nature are supplied. ~ Francois Fenelon

Made up of corallitic accretions and painful increments, lit on rare occasions by bolts of revelation, and then stuffed behind the wainscotting to grope in the mouse-turd dust, art is the equivalent of athlete's foot, at best an exquisite itch, at worst an excuse to stop walking. On the emotional side, it is either masturbation with a hockey glove or a night beneath the sliding moon that shames Eros. ~ Harold Town

This is my letter to the world That never wrote to me ~ Emily Dickinson

A poet's purified truth can cause no pain, no offense. True art is above false honor. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Art should become as one with its surroundings. ~ Isamu Noguchi

I must say a few words about memory. It is full of holes. If you were to lay it out upon a table, it would resemble a scrap of lace. I am a lover of history . . . [but] history has one flaw. It is a subjective art, no less so than poetry or music. . . . The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on. My mother, we both know, wrote a truth in The 19th Wife– a truth that corresponded to her memory and desires. It is not the truth, certainly not. But a truth, yes . . . Her book is a fact. It remains so, even if it is snowflaked with holes. ~ David Ebershoff

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

All the arts come from God and are to be respected as divine inventions ~ John Calvin

Desire is the motivating force behind all progress and advancement in science, art, industry and in all phases of life. ~ Joseph Murphy

The industrialisation of England had quickened during Hardy's life and in the novel he places great importance on rural culture and the need of man to interact with, and understand the natural world, however indifferent it may be to human survival. The author does not sketch a portrait of an idyllic rural scene, but highlights and details the devastating consequences and brute force of the natural world. Hardy uses these disasters to underline the prominence of chance or luck in life, rather than benevolent design by a creator and how this might impact moral decisions. Impressionist art also influences Hardy's perception of reality and what knowledge each individual is capable of attaining in any situation. ~ Thomas Hardy