What Is Art Quotes

What is art? Nature concentrated. ~ Honore De Balzac

Perhaps it's good for one to suffer. Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life? ~ Aldous Huxley

What is art if not a concentrated and impassioned effort to make something with the little we have, the little we see? ~ Andre Dubus

I very much enjoyed Leo Tolstoy's What is Art? I can't quote it, it's been a while, but at the end of the day, the idea is that "art that does good in the world is art, and what doesn't is not. It's propaganda or something else. It's bad." ~ Scott Avett

That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is. ~ Amy Reed

What are books but folly, and what is an education but an arrant hypocrisy, and what is art but a curse when they touch not the heart and impel it not to action? ~ Louis Sullivan

What is art, if not an excuse to be adventurous? ~ Nenia Campbell

There is a skill to learning. It is all about what is and what is not. While Science is knowing what is, Art is creating what is not. ~ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

What is art except being the real estate agent of your own neuroses. ~ Guillaume Morissette

When an artist paints a flower, she borrows the beauty from nature and adds fragrance from her own heart. ~ Debasish Mridha

What is art? It is not decoration. It is the re-living of experience. ~ Rebecca West

But what is art other than revealing human nature? ~ Marina Abramovic

know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives. - Leo Tolstoy, What Is Art? ~ Zia Haider Rahman

What is art? It is not just nature, it is nurtured nature. It is intelligence applied to what physical ability you have. ~ Rudolf Nureyev

A painting is a universal language which everyone can read, understand, and interpret in his own way through the power of imagination. ~ Debasish Mridha

Beauty may no longer be what it was before. It has become suspect and many have dethroned it from its art pedestal. A lot of questions are raised: "When" is art?", "What" is art?", "Can this be art? " As some feel so powerless and speechless, they painfully resort to the uplifting and comforting counsel of their art shrink. ~ Erik Pevernagie

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real. ~ Rabindranath Tagore

And what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

What is art to the dilettante but the initiation of the sacred few to the exclusion of the profane crowd? ... ~ John Geddes

What is art? Art grows from joy and sorrow, but mostly from sorrow. It grows from human lives. ~ Edvard Munch

At one point cinema and photography weren't treated as art. Now it's crazy to think they're not. The key question is "What is art today?" The most important artists of the last 20 years are Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, because the influence they have had is incredible and they've changed the world. That is art. ~ Ferran Adria

What is art? Art is tar, rearranged. Art is tar on canvas or tar on tarp or tar on a naked body. Art is a bird chirping changed into something visual. Art is an image of a thousand beaks breaking into the office of a quack doctor. I know that doctor, and I've personally spoken to ten of those beaks. Art is rhythm, two hands clapping at a urinal while a third shakes off pee to the beat. Good art stays with you your whole life, especially if that good art is a tattoo. Good art is my name, written backwards, inked on your upper lip in a furry font. Art imitates life, just as life imitates Orafoura. Art can be anything from a Manet to a Monet to a painting of money to a missile. Art can save the world, or devastate it. (We could drop another big bomb on Japan, though I'm not advocating dumping Basquiat paintings on Hiroshima). Art rhymes with a bodily function, and everybody should let their creativity rip everywhere from the privacy of their bathrooms to small heated boxes with four of their closest friends. Art is thinking outside that box, and desperately trying to escape. ~ Jarod Kintz

Art is aesthetic communication of the soul - in fact, it's the best of that communication - and taken in its entirety has formed a body of work to stand alongside Science and Religion as one of the three great constructs of culture to aid the individual in his or her struggle to survive in Nature. ~ Anthony Marais

What is art but the denial of life? ~ Fernando Pessoa

Art is an expression that transcends religion, culture, country, people and time. ~ Amit Ray

What is art? ... From a strictly logical point of view, a question with no clear answer comes under the suspicion of being meaningless. But a strictly logical point of view never shows us much about art ... ~ Carter Ratcliff

Ah! What avails the classic bent
And what the cultured word,
Against the undoctored incident
That actually occurred?
And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme-
When Nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time? ~ Rudyard Kipling

When we can't determine what is art - when you get to that point where we're not sure, that's the greatest likelihood that we're actually experiencing something great. But I think that's what the art world is most afraid of, because you lose that security. Then we don't know how to assign evaluation, whether it's cultural or otherwise. ~ Richard Phillips

What is art? Prostitution. ~ Charles Baudelaire

At home what is 'wonderful' tends to be an exception that's arranged; it is useful, or at least edifying. In Persia it might just as well spring from an oversight, or a sin, or a catastrophe which, by breaking the normal run of events, offers life unexpected scope for unfolding its splendours before eyes that are always ready to rejoice in them. ~ Nicolas Bouvier

Getting caught up in the drama only creates more drama. Take an intermission, step out, chill out, ask yourself, what is this drama really about, what role am I playing? ~ Hazel Butterworth

The truth of practical intellect is understood not as conformity to an extramental being but as conformity to a right desire; the end is no longer to know what is, but to bring into existence that which is not yet. ~ Jacques Maritain

What is Tumblr anyway? Is it like Facebook?"
"No, and you're forbidden to get one. No parents allowed. You guys already took over Facebook. ~ Angie Thomas

Well, I enjoy my life. You know, I think life is an art, and that one has to live it as an art. That's your choice. ~ John Travolta

Politics is the art of achieving prestige and power without merit. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

In a narcissistic cathexis, you invest more energy into your ideas about another person than in the actual, objective, external person.
So the man who falls in love with beauty is quite different from the man who loves a girl and feels she is beautiful and can see what is beautiful about her. ~ Alison Bechdel

At the very core of conservatism lies comfort with contradiction, acceptance of the fact that life is not fair; that ideals must forever be goals, not destinations; that the perfect is not the enemy of the good but one standard by which we understand what is good in the first place - though not the only standard. ~ Jonah Goldberg

It is said,' said the Aga Morat, 'that blindness of the eyes is a lighter thing than blindness of the perceptive faculties of the mind. The sun is high: the perception is dazzled. One has made divers chambers available to us in these poor houses for an hour. Let us retire and, by giving ease to the flesh, bring new light also to the proper functions of the mind. There, for the Hakim's servant Mr Blyth, and the lady. In this chamber, Crawford Efendi and I shall have much to discuss.… Sweet to be taken up, you say, as medicine is by the lip. Such a creature I enjoy, thin-skinned, tender and delicate, light of flesh and goodly in make, impulsive in walk and beautiful in the justness of stature. Communing thus, shall not our dreaming souls melt?'

For a moment, Lymond did not reply. Then he said, in the same level voice, 'It is written before God, that after this hour we depart all four, in good health to Djerba?'

The Aga Morat had risen. Looking down, his heavy face creased in a smile. 'It is written,' he said.

Slowly, Lymond rose also. He looked neither at Jerott nor at Marthe, but stepped straight out from under the awning and confronted the Aga. In the blinding white light, the fine lines of his skin were all suddenly visible, and his eyes by contrast quite dark. But his hair, uncut since Marseilles, shone mint-gold in the sun. 'If it is so agreed,' Lymond said, 'I am solicitous for thee, as thou art for me.' And without pausing, he followed th ~ Dorothy Dunnett

History is not just about dates and quotations. And it's not just about politics, the military and social issues, though much of it of course is about that. It's about everything. It's about life history. It's human. And we have to see it that way. We have to teach it that way. We have to read it that way. It's about art, music, literature, money, science, love - the human experience. ~ David McCullough

It isn't normal to invade someone's privacy to that degree. It's what is often seen as a form of emotional abuse. ~ Paula Hawkins

Well, what is a relationship? It's about two people having tremendous weaknesses and vulnerabilities, like we all do, and one person being able to strengthen the other in their areas of vulnerability, and vice versa. You need each other. You complete each other, passion and romance aside. ~ Jane Fonda

No intelligent radical can fail to realize the need of the rational education of the young. The rearing of the child must become a process of liberation by methods which shall not impose ready-made ideas, but which should aid the child's natural self-unfoldment. The purpose of such an education is not to force the child's adaptation to accepted concepts. but to give free play to his [and her] originality, initiative, and individuality. Only by freeing education from compulsion and restraint can we create the environment for the manifestation of the spontaneous interest and inner incentives on the part of the child. Only thus can we supply rational conditions favorable to the development of the child's natural tendencies and his latent emotional and mental faculties. Such methods of education, essentially aiding the child's imitative quality and ardor for knowledge, will develop a generation of healthy intellectual independence. It will produce men and women capable, in the words of Francisco Ferrer, "of evolving without stopping, of destroying and renewing their environment without cessation; of renewing themselves also; always ready to accept what is best, happy in the triumph of new ideas, aspiring to live multiple lives in one life. ~ Alexander Berkman

The smudging makes the paintings a bit more complete. When they're not blurred, so many details seem wrong, and the whole thing is wrong too. Then smudging can help make the painting invincible, surreal, more enigmatic - that's how easy it is. ~ Gerhard Richter

On many days, harder than the act of making the art itself is the act of sharing it and living in a culture that you know is built to tear you down. ~ Amanda Palmer

If you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods. I call this the 'slow hunch.' We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them." Solving the problem means being in the right place at the right time - available to the propitious moment, the kairos. Perhaps counterintuitively, protecting what is left of this flow from the pressing obligation of new choices gives us a leg up on innovation. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

[Joseph Bucklin Bishop said] "...The peculiarity about him is that he has what is essentially a boy's mind. What he thinks he says at once, says aloud. It is his distinguishing characteristic, and I don't know as he will ever outgrow it. But with it he has great qualities which make him an invaluable public servant--inflexible honesty, absolute fearlessness, and devotion to good government which amounts to religion. We must let him work his way, for nobody can induce him to change it. ~ Edmund Morris

Online media is the future, and younger feminists are already instrumental in using social media and multi-media platforms on the web to document street harassment, archive and critique the media, and create art. ~ Jennifer Baumgardner

The objective of the Classical Art of Riding is to train the horse not only to be brilliant in the movements and the exercises of the High School but also to be quiet, supple and obedient and by his smooth movements to make riding a true pleasure ~ Alois Podhajsky

Not only in antiquity but in our own times also laws have been passed ... to secure good conditions for workers; so it is right that the art of medicine should contribute its portion for the benefit and relief of those for whom the law has shown such foresight ... [We] ought to show peculiar zeal ... in taking precautions for their safety. I for one have done all that lay in my power, and have not thought it beneath me to step into workshops of the meaner sort now and again and study the obscure operations of mechanical arts. ~ Bernardino Ramazzini

Those only can thoroughly feel the meaning of death who know what is perfect love. ~ George Eliot

(...) an inner feeling called "Stimmung" by the germans and best translated as sentiment (it is to be regreted that this word, sentiment, which is meant to describe the poetical efforts of an artist living soul, has been misused and finally, ridiculed. Was there ever a great word that the masses did not try immediatly to cheapen and desecrate?) (...) ~ Wassily Kandinsky

Is it wrong worldly interaction (avyavahar) when someone insults you? It is (correct) worldly interaction (vyavahar). Gnani (Self-realized person) will be pleased that he has become free from karma bondage, when someone insults Him; while a non Self-realized person will fight back. ~ Dada Bhagwan

What is love if not the gravity of souls? ~ Courtney M. Privett

Unless we believe in the hero, what is there
To believe? Incisive what, the fellow
Of what good. Devise. Make him of mud ... ~ Wallace Stevens

To sing a song is like whispering to a child's ear. It is an art heavily relying on improvisation. ~ Andrea Bocelli

The closer art reflects reality, the less artistic it becomes. Art is most enticing when it mimics life as a wolf dressed in sheep's clothing. The contrary is always a grave disappointment. ~ Anthony Marais

A good conversationalist directs attention, inspires, corrects, affirms, and empowers others. It is a demanding vocation that involves attentiveness, skilled listening, awareness of one's own interpretive frames, and a will to understand and discern what is true. ~ Marilyn Chandler McEntyre

THOU RIGHTEOUS AND HOLY SOVEREIGN,

In whose hand is my life
and whose are all my ways,
Keep me from fluttering about religion;
fix me firm in it,
for I am irresolute;
my decisions are smoke and vapour,
and I do not glorify thee,
or behave according to thy will;
Cut me not off before my thoughts grow to responses,
and the budding of my soul into full flower,
for thou art forbearing and good,
patient and kind.
Save me from myself,
from the artifices and deceits of sin,
from the treachery of my perverse nature,
from denying thy charge against my offences,
from a life of continual rebellion against thee,
from wrong principles, views, and ends;
for I know that all my thoughts,
affections, desires and pursuits
are alienated from thee.
I have acted as if I hated thee,
although thou art love itself;
have contrived to tempt thee to the uttermost,
to wear out thy patience;
have lived evilly in word and action.
Had I been a prince
I would long ago have crushed such a rebel;
Had I been a father
I would long since have rejected my child.
O, thou Father of my spirit,
thou King of my life,
cast me not into destruction,
drive me not from thy presence,
but wound my heart that it may be healed;
break it that thine own hand may make it whole. ~ Arthur Bennett

I also want to raise the possibility that there are, in the very long term, "virtue effects" in economics- for instance that widespread corrupt accounting will eventually create bad long term consequences as a sort of obverse effect from the virtue-based boost double-entry book-keeping gave to the heyday of Venice. I suggest that when the financial scene starts reminding you of Sodomand Gomorrah, you should fear practical consequences even if you like to participate in what is going on. ~ Charlie Munger

The Art of Peace is the religion that is not a religion; it perfects and completes all religions. ~ Morihei Ueshiba

Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in its Marxian sense. Chicken! In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease, and support. Light travels at a quarter of a million miles per second so that we can see to comb our hair or read in the paper that ham hocks are cheaper than yesterday. De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse. ~ Saul Bellow

I finally figured out how hard the battle between your love for me and your love for art, your future, and your career must've been. It just hurts to know art won, is all." ~Gage ~ Shanora Williams

One of the peculiar features of philosophical questions is how eager people are to offer solutions that miss the point of the questions. Sometimes these failed solutions are scientific, and sometimes they are religious, and sometimes they are based on what is called plain common sense. ~ Rebecca Goldstein

A work of art can only come from the interior of man. Art is the form of the image formed upon the nerves, heart, brain and eye of man. ~ Edvard Munch

First off, I have to mention what is undoubtedly the greatest phenomenon of the modern era: All You Can Eat Buffets. ~ Alexei Sayle

Sleep is no mean art. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche