Art Quotes

I think that the destructive element is too much neglected in art.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.

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.

I've started doing book reviews for Barnes & Noble! They saw that I did a lot of book reviews on the site, and they figured that it might not be a bad thing if they got me to do some for them as well. I gave them five categories I'd be interested in reviewing, from art to fiction to music.

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference.

The thing is that as you grow through life, the pursuit of art and the pursuit of new ideas, all these things keeps your mind elastic.

The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.

I always saw hurdles as a form of art, because it's very individual. One technique that may produce a world record for one guy could be useless for another guy.

Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which nature herself is animated.

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.

Discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing.

I like the fact that in ancient Chinese art the great painters always included a deliberate flaw in their work: human creation is never perfect.

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.

Art should never try to be popular. The public should try to make itself artistic.

Art? That's a man's name.

To speak of morals in art is to speak of legislature in sex. Art is the sex of the imagination.

I am a poor man and of little worth, who is laboring in that art that God has given me in order to extend my life as long as possible.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.