c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
ART (in a business marketing context)Authority RelevantTimely
— Richie Norton
Branding is a lot of things, but one thing it's not is soft.When you brand, rebrand or brand-diggity, ask yourself one thing to do it right: how will my brand create buyers?If you’re in business, that’s the goal. Buyers. Branding done well creates both long term loyalty and timely purchases.
— Richie Norton
I'm tired of 'pretentious' just being used as an excuse to dismiss anything that fucking expects you to have a brain.
— T.J. Kirk
The scary part of being an artist is knowing that what makes you a better artist can also kill you.
— Darnell Lamont Walker
The work of art always requires us to adapt to it—and in this manner can be distinguished from escapism or shallow entertainment, which instead aims to adapt to the audience, to give the public exactly what it wants. We can tell that we are encountering a real work of art by the degree to which it resists subjectivity.
— Ted Gioia, How to Listen to Jazz
I had come down here, not to serve God as a craftsman should, but to show my people how great a craftsman I was. They cared not.
— Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pook's Hill
The expressions of those moving about a picture gallery show ill-concealed disappointment that they only find pictures there.
— Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings
Nothing is owed to us in life, not even the innocence of a blue sky. Great art is the art of thankfulness for the abundance of every moment. Writing is a Chinese variant of this thankfulness, a courtesy to life in its cloak of nothing, lined with love.
— Christian Bobin
I discovered in nature the non utilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.
— Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory
If you judge art by its cover, you efface the very essence of it
— Evy Michaels
A pianist is a painter of music
— Goitsemang Mvula
It's true that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it's also true that a word is worth a thousand pictures.
— Marty Johncox
A museum is a place where nothing was lost, just rediscovered…
— Nanette L. Avery
We have all read in scientific books, and, indeed, in all romances, the story of the man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is. Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God; but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.
— G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
High culture is paranoid about sentiment, but human beings are intensely sentimental. And if art doesn’t speak language that’s acceptable to people, it relegates itself to obscurity.
— Thomas Kinkade
If you judge art be its cover, you efface the very essence of it
— Evy Michaels
For a pregnant woman to give birth, she's gotta feel the pain of pulling a watermelon out of her nostril. For an Artist to create a masterpiece, he's gotta feel the pain of pulling entire galaxies out of his ass.
— Lucifer
This is what the great artists manage. They flatter us, by observing better than others and then speaking to each of us as individuals and in a language that we worry we may be the only ones left caring for.
— Tristan Gooley, How To Read Water: Clues, Signs & Patterns from Puddles to the Sea
That's what attracts us to serious paintings, I think: that shortfall, which we might call "personality", or maybe even "pain".
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Bluebeard
All portraits reveal both the the painter and the person painted. In many ways all paintings are self-portraits. All part of why art informs.
— Brent M. Jones
The machinery of the sky that confounds us on earth with endless transformations of clouds in the light of dawn does not compare to the extraordinary tenacity of human beings, the way of human life, the presentiment of approaching death, the existence of love, the brilliant coruscations of light and the dark scars of our lives, to say nothing of the incomprehensible form of the cosmos and the overwhelming mysteries of space, time, distance.
— Yayoi Kusama, Infinity Net: The Autobiography of Yayoi Kusama
The nature of a work of art is to be not a part, nor yet a copy of the real world but a world in itself, independent, complete, autonomous; and to possess it fully you must enter that world, conform to its laws, and ignore for a time the beliefs, aims, and particular conditions which belong to you in the other world of reality.
— A.C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry
I am in favour of illusion, not alienation... Drama must create a factitious spell-binding present moment and imprison the spectator in it. The theatre apes the profound truth that we are extended beings who yet can only exist in the present.
— Iris Murdoch, The Sea, the Sea
Writing is hard. Writing that is good, writing that is powerful enough to evoke a change or an authentic emotion or even just an idea in another human being is about as mysterious as an alchemical recipe, but there are a few known ingredients. Craft? Yes, absolutely. Devotion? A load - yes! Humility? Not vital, I suppose, but all my favorites include at least a dash. Before those can be added to the cauldron though, you must have a base of Honesty. Honesty is difficult to find in public spaces these days (and getting harder every goddamn day) but if you're quiet, and patient, you can usually find some hidden in your room somewhere. (It helps to turn off the lights, for some reason.) Problem is, Honesty is invariably bound to Vulnerability and the only thing that cuts the bitterness of Vulnerability is Courage. And Courage? Well. Courage is the hardest thing of all.
— Kelly Sue DeConnick, The Secret Loves of Geek Girls
An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can’t feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn’tcapable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won’t put down his magic brush and head the fightagainst the oppressor, then he isn’t a great artist.
— Diego Rivera
Tensurrealism creates actual and non-compromised reality, jamboree, fervor, fascination, poetics of an active enthusiasm, interludium, lyrical practice, active happiness.
— Lepota L. Cosmo
Look within - there is no end!
— Malebo Sephodi
Seeing beautiful art is like feeling kisses from angels all over your face.
— Dragotel Viorica
July 7, 1986: Montreux	It is only now that I realize the importance of a biography. I mean I always have realized that I enjoy to read (and have learned many things from) the biographies of artists whom I admire. It is probably my main source of education. In the beginning of my “career” (what an awful word) I was misled by a teacher who thought the things I was writing to be pretentious and self important. Years later, when I read those things I wrote in 1978, it didn’t seem so pretentious for almost everything I wrote about “wanting to do,” I actually did in the four or five years that followed.
— Keith Haring, Keith Haring Journals
There is one question George is asked about life and art and which is more important, and George said art is more important because it is immortal. This struck a very deep note inside me. For I am quite aware of the chance that I have or will have AIDS.	The odds are very great and, in fact, the symptoms already exist. My friends are dropping like flies and I know in my heart that it is only divine intervention that has kept me alive this long. I don’t know if I have five months or five years, but I know my days are numbered.		This is why my activities and projects are so important now. To do as much as possible as quickly as possible. I’m sure that what will live on after I die is important enough to make sacrifices of my personal luxury and leisure time. Work is all I have and art is more important than life.
— Keith Haring, Keith Haring Journals
And what the music elicits—in me, in most everyone who hears it and takes to it—is a strangely comforting, sensual melancholy, a gentle sadness, the kind that comes with soft rain. It’s the same for all truly great dark art. There’s a pleasure in seeing our shadows paraded beautifully. It’s liberating to find them so prettily decked out, a sort of reverse Halloween.
— William Todd Schultz, Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith
By now it is a ready-made cliché—the rock star dying young, whether by excess, by accident, or by suicide. For some, it’s part of the act, macabre performance art, a final song. This last mode, suicide, can be elusive. In fact, it almost always is. It might masquerade as excess—reckless, immoderate drug use. There is subintentioned suicide too. The person may simultaneously wish to live and die. No special effort is made to stay alive, but none is made to keep living, either outcome perfectly acceptable.
— William Todd Schultz, Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith
Our life is our masterpiece, it's up to us on how we paint our story. It's up to us how we see the substances we have. At the end of the day, all our accumulated stuff will be presented as our greatest piece of work.
— Nathaniel E. Quimada
The data on the economic utility of artists is really, really strong. Artists and entrepreneurs are the same people...and of course entrepreneurs are the people who provide all of the vision for the entire capitalist system. They're absolutely necessary.But conservatives tend to be so blind to art that they can't even see that the artists are the ones who drive the economy forward!
— Jordan Peterson
I never paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.
— Farida kahlo
Facts produce structures, objects are lyrical realities.
— Lepota L. Cosmo
Every child has known God,Not the God of names,Not the God of don'ts,Not the God who ever doesAnything weird,But the God who knows only 4 wordsAnd keeps repeating them, saying:"Come Dance with Me."Come Dance.
— Hafiz, The Illustrated Hafiz - A Selection of Ghazals from His Divan
As an artist she finds Dick's work hopelessly naive, yet she is a lover of certain kinds of bad art, art which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it. Bad art makes the viewer much more active. (Years later Chris would realise that her fondness for bad art is exactly like Jane Eyre's attraction to Rochester, a mean horse-faced junkie: bad characters invite invention.
— Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
We suicide ourselves for our own survival. Is there any hope of dipping back into the past and circling round it like you can in art?
— Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
When the form's in place, everything within it can be pure feeling.
— Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
If art's a seismographic project, when that project meets with failure, failure must become the subject too.
— Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
Artist communities love to bullshit each other and glad-hand one another, and there's no room for the crippling honesty of comedy."I'm a painter" -- well... you don't...probably need to do that.. . . if you're painting something that doesn't exist, I understand that, I can appreciate- . . . but if your pain- 'oh, it's a barnyard scene in autumn'--well then just take a picture of a barn in autumn! It's way better than a painting! - Before Turning the Gun on Himself [2012]
— Doug Stanhope
I really don't like art with a message, unless the message is crystal clear.If you have a message that really needs to be said, just fuckin' say it! Don't hide it in indecipherable lyrics... a sculpture, it's a play, the subtext... just fuckin' say it, 'cause the people who need to hear messages are dumb as shit--the masses of humanity are dumb as shit, and you're really just pandering to your friends. Say what the fuck you mean, just say it! Title the song 'eat more leafy greens'. 'Give a hoot, don't pollute' is as much message and art combined, 'cause I get that, it's a poem but I'm pretty sure you're saying 'don't pollute'. But if you have something... 'ooh, I have the cure for cancer...and I've hidden it in this Rubix cube!!' -- just fuckin' say it! - Before Turning the Gun on Himself [2012]
— Doug Stanhope
Art is a visual language
—  I'm just perfecting my alphabet.
We sing lyrical excess, exacerbated expressionism, imponed objectivity,inventiveness, meta-baroque, extravaganza, super metaphor, sublimity, strident, exposure, super-pone, noise, super-objectivity, zillionism, fragmentation and aesthetics of facts, suractivism.
— Lepota L. Cosmo
Artists are indeed unlikely to be good, goodness would silence them.
— Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
When you speak of my insanity, please let it be with the beauty only art knows. Let it bleed till it becomes creativity and maybe, just maybe, for that single moment my soul will finally be adorned in its own skin.
— P.H. Wilson
It's 4am again and I'm just getting started. People are boring and I want to burn with excitement or anger and bleed, bleed through my words. I want to get all fucked up and write real and raw and ugly and beautifully. I bet you're sleeping safe and calm, and you can stay there, it's safer there, and you wouldn't stand one night on this journey my mind wanders off to every night you close your eyes. I'll stay here one day and I will never come down.  I promise I can fly before I hit the ground. It doesn't even hurt anymore. I swear, it doesn't hurt.
— Charlotte Eriksson, Empty Roads & Broken Bottles; in search for The Great Perhaps
Part of the artist's job is to make the commonplace singular, to project a different interpretation onto the conventional.
— Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
And I see that his brown eye has a splash of green in it and the green one a splash of brown. Like Cezanne painted them. Impressionist eyes.
— Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun
Nor that he's regarding my face with the same intensity I am his. We're two paintings staring at each other across a room.
— Jandy Nelson, I'll Give You the Sun
Life is a collection of memories and feelings. Mawkish sentimentally urges us to engage in artistic overtures, we yearn to share with other people a melody of rudimentary experiences and respond to a stabilizing tune strung together with a shared ethos. We walk in parallel strides with our brethren seeking out equivalent affirmations of our being. We long to shout out to the world that we once walked this earth; we seek to leave in our wake traces of our pithy habitation. Our unfilled longing propels us into committing senseless acts of self-sabotage and then we desperately seek redemption from our slippery selves by building monuments to the human spirit. We employ a bewildering blend of conscious and unconscious materials to construct synoptic testaments to our temporal existence. We labor on the canvas of our choosing to scrawl our inimitable mark, fanatically toiling to escape a sentence of total obliteration along with our impending mortality.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness.
— Jane Hirshfield, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World
It follows from Schopenhauer’s analysis that evert genuine work of art must have its origin in direct perception; that is to say it does not originate in concepts, and concepts are not what it communicates. This is what more than anything else differentiates good art from bad, or more accurately authentic from inauthentic art. The latter often originates in a desire on the part of the artist to meet some demand external to himself – to win approval, say, or be in the fashion, or supply a market – or else to put over a message of some sort. Such an artist starts by trying to thin what it would be a good idea to do – in other words, the starting point of the process for him is something that exists in terms of concepts. The inevitable result is dead art, of whatever kind, whether imitative, academic, commercial, didactic or fashion-conscious. It may be successful in its day because it meets the demands of its day, but once that day is over it has no inner life of its own with which to outlive it.
— Bryan Magee, The Philosophy of Schopenhauer
Art is the medium through which new thoughts, perspectives, and attitudes are brought into the world.
— James Rozoff
The primary math of the real world is one and one equals two. The layman (as, often, do I) swings that every day. He goes to the job, does his work, pays his bills and comes home. One plus one equals two. It keeps the world spinning. But artists, musicians, con men, poets, mystics and such are paid to turn that math on its head, to rub two sticks together and bring forth fire. Everybody performs this alchemy somewhere in their life, but it’s hard to hold on to and easy to forget. People don’t come to rock shows to learn something. They come to be reminded of something they already know and feel deep down in their gut. That when the world is at its best, when we are at our best, when life feels fullest, one and one equals three. It’s the essential equation of love, art, rock ’n’ roll and rock ’n’ roll bands. It’s the reason the universe will never be fully comprehensible, love will continue to be ecstatic, confounding, and true rock ’n’ roll will never die.
— Bruce Springsteen, Born to Run
The act of looking appraisingly at a man, studying his body and asking to photograph him, is a brazen venture for a woman; for a male photographer, these acts are commonplace, even expected.
— Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
I'm going out on a limb here and say that I believe my morality should have no bearing on the discussion of the pictures I made. ... Oscar Wilde, when attacked in a similar ad hominem way, insisted that it is senseless to speak of morality when discussing art, asserting that the hypocritical, prudish, and philistine English public, when unable to find the art in a work of art, instead looked for the main in it.
— Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs
We're not copying life, we're making a comment on it.
— Richard Williams, The Animator's Survival Kit: A Manual of Methods, Principles, and Formulas for Classical, Computer, Games, Stop Motion and Internet Animators
I see art in everything. Your shoes. That car. This coffee cup. It's art if you see it as art.
— Andy Warhol
Art is not what you see but what you make others see
— Edgar Degas
Art is what you get away with
— Andy Warhol
I see art in everything. Your shoes. That car. This coffee cup. It's art if you see it as art. The best art are those dime novels. People will put those books in a museum one day. Artists will make paintings of them. They're beautiful. And for everyone. That's how I want my art to be.
— Andy Warhol
I could never be a Communist. I could never be regimented. I could never be told what to write.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald
Pain fuels artistry and creativity. Harness your suffering and become a master of your art.
— Michelle C. Hillstrom
I may have stumbledand stammered at your unexpected push, but the breezeanchored me and I learnt the art of survival
— Vijaya Gowrisankar
I can't remember the name of the piece, or the artist. Maybe it wasn't even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behavior is an act of performance.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
If we were in a room full of art, I would stare at her.
— Kia Amazona, The Way It Was Before
Intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always — these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must travel beyond the realm of the hour and the restraint of the habit. Nor can the actual work be well separated from the entire life. Like the knights of the Middle Ages, there is little the creatively inclined person can do but to prepare himself, body and spirit, for the labor to come — for his adventures are all unknown. In truth, the work itself is the adventure. And no artist could go about this work, or would want to, with less than extraordinary energy and concentration. The extraordinary is what art is about.
— Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays
Creating is like the oxygen in my air.
— Syd Murray
You know, there used to be a difference between authentic music and sellout music. I'm talking about when I was young, in the sixties? Back then we knew there was a soullessness to the sellouts, and we wanted to be on the side of the artists. But now? Being a sellout is the authentic thing. When Molly Miller says 'I'm just being real,' what she means is that everyone wants money and fame and any artist who claims otherwise is lying. the only fundamental truth is greed, and the only question is who is up front about this. That's the new authenticity. Molly Miler can never be accused of selling out because selling out was her goal all along.
— Nathan  Hill, The Nix
I love that an idea can be so powerful it doesn't matter whether I've seen the artwork for real or not.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
How I adored to draw as a child, a teen; all my life before I began to try and shape a career out of it.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
Now I wonder if each artwork is in fact utterly inaccessible to everybody but the person to whom it is secretly addressed?
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
Perhaps never before in history has the artist been so certain that the more daring, iconoclastic, absurd, and inaccessible he is, the more he will be recognized, praised, spoiled, idolatrized. In some countries the result has even been an academicism in reverse, the academicism of the “avant-garde” - to such a point that any artistic experience that makes no concessions to this new conformism is in danger of being stifled or ignored.
— Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality
You can't dance to paintings. This is something Ben said, during one of our White Cube conversations, back when I was still wrong about him. He said it even though, at the time, he was desperately trying to be a painter. He said it because it was true and not because it was something either of us wanted to hear.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
Art, and sadness, which last forever.
— Sara Baume, A Line Made by Walking
I want to remind us all that art is dangerous. I want to remind you of the history of artists who have been murdered, slaughtered, imprisoned, chopped up, refused entrance. The history of art, whether it's in music or written or what have you, has always been bloody, because dictators and people in office and people who want to control and deceive know exactly the people who will disturb their plans.And those people are artists. They're the ones that sing the truth. And that is something that society has got to protect. But when you enter that field, no matter whether that's Sonia's poetry or Ta-Nehisi's rather startlingly clear prose, it's a dangerous pursuit. Somebody's out to get you. You have to know it before you start, and do it under those circumstances, because it is one of the most important things that human beings do.
— Toni Morrison
Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming about him into his work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his prejudices, his principles, and his common sense. The only artists I have ever known who are personally delightful are bad artists. Good artists give everything to their art, and consequently are perfectly uninteresting in themselves. A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
If we really are saying rap is an art form, then we got to be more responsible for our lyrics. If you see everybody dying because of what you saying, it don’t matter that you didn’t make them die, it just matters that you didn’t save them.
— Tupac Shakur
Art is the product of an imperfect world. In an ideal world, art would not exist.
— Marty Rubin
Creative freedom is prosperity for the soul.
— Michele Jennae
For the first time, we recognized a medium that takes our ordinary, everyday objects like bowls, baskets, and quilts and elevates them to art forms that rival painting and sculpture in their impact.(From the forward to "Crafts in America: Celebrating Two Centuries of Artists and Objects.
— Jimmy Carter
Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. If one’s own existence has no form, if its events do not come handily to mind and disclose their significance, we feel about ourselves as if we were reading a bad book.
— Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Art covers not even a corner of life, only a knot or two here and there, far apart and without relation to the pattern. How could we hope that it would ever bring order and beauty to the whole of that vast and intractable fabric, that sail flapping in the contrary winds of the universe?
— Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
If Roberts had been a poet or a painter or a musician
—  we might have had a masterpiece. As he was neither: we had a monster
Sabism is deabstraction, metacolorism, thematism, exotic, convalescent substrate, soft act, collectivism, pluralization, sensationalism, pluralart, thematic colourism, reabstraction.
— Lepota L. Cosmo
Sabism is thematic pallet, philosophical colourism, chromatic signature and dual art, bi-chromatic scale, soft scale, poetics of attractiveness, mythologism, actual value, logism of color, active color, logical panel.
— Lepota L. Cosmo
The sound a box of Lego makes is the noise of a child's mind working, looking for the right piece. Shake it, and it's almost creativity in aural form.
— Grayson Perry, Playing to the Gallery
Art is the product of an imperfect world. In a perfect world, art would not exist.
— Marty Rubin
An artist's job is to make new clichés.
— Grayson Perry, Playing to the Gallery
It was not my intention - it never was - to invent a character who should speak for me, the author, in person. A character is in a story to fill a role there, and the character's life along with its expression of life is defined by that surrounding - indeed is created by its own story. Yet, it seems to me now, years after I wrote The Golden Apples, that I did bring forth a character with whom I came to feel oddly in touch. She derived from what I already knew for myself, even felt I had always known. What I have put into her is my passion for my own life work, my own art. Exposing yourself to risk is a truth that Mrs. Eckhart and I had in common. What animates and possesses me is what drives Mrs. Eckhart, the love of her art and the love of giving it, the desire to give it until there is no more left. Of course any writer is in part all of his characters. How otherwise would they be known to him, occur to him, become what they are? In the making of her character out of my most inward and most deeply felt self, I would say I have found my voice in my own fiction.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
I am from Lebanon, from Beirut and SaidaI am from the ground underneath my home I am from the trees, the cedar treeI come from Tabouleh and brown eyes, from Karim...Kassar and KassemI come from happiness and cultureFrom "Habibi" and "Hayete"I am from all religionsI am from the room beneath the stars.
— Zeina Kassem, Talal Kassem
The idea that people can be improved by being offended will finally have to meet the idea (espoused some of the time by some of the same people) that books, popular songs, movies, television shows, sex videos, and so on are "just fiction" or "just art" and therefore exist "for their own sake" and have no influence. To argue that works of art are "only" fictions or self-expressions and therefore cannot cause bad behavior is to argue also that they cannot cause good behavior. It is, moreover, to make an absolute division between art and life, experience and life, mind and body - a division that is intolerable to anyone who is at all serious about being a human or a member of a community or even a citizen.
— Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry
A person does not reach the pinnacle of self-realization without relentlessly exploring the parameters of the self, exhausting their psychic energy coming to know oneself. Without society to rebel against and to sail away from, there would be no advances in civilization; there would be no need for healers and mystics, priests and artist, or shaman and writers. It is our curiosity and refusal to be satisfied with the status quo that compels us to challenge ourselves to learn and continue to grow. We only establish inner peace of mind with acceptance of the world, with the recognition of our connection to the entirety of the universe, and understanding that chaos and change are inevitable. We must also love because without love there are no acts of creation. Without love, humankind is a spasmodic pool of brutality and suffering. Love is a balm. It cures human aches and pains; it unites couples, families, and cultures. Love is a creative force, without love there is no art or religion. Art expresses thought and feelings, an articulation of adore and reverence.
— Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls
Cheers to all the Rebels out there who care way too much about Art and Truth and Magic to fall in line with the mundane task of fitting in.
— Scott Stabile
Like God, art seemed to hover over us, perhaps benevolent, and often sublime, but constantly, maddeningly out of reach.
— Matthew Gallaway, #Gods
I could only liken it to the strength of a wheat stalk, which when struck by a storm, bends to the ground, but does not break. This stalk of wheat stands tall like a spear in a tempest, clinging to the earth where its roots are embedded deep, embracing the sun from which it draws life.
— Zeina Kassem, Crossing
I think, if one is a true art lover, he can't stick to a particular genre. Art knows no partitions, no boundaries.
— SaketKr
The ride to Alicante had been like something out of a dream, or a cheesy romance novel. The two of them astride white stallions, galloping across the countryside, charging across emerald meadows and through a forest the color of flames. Isabelle's hair streamed behind her like a river of ink, and Simon had even managed not to fall off his horse--never a foregone conclusion.
— Cassandra Clare, Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy
An educated person's ideas of Art are drwan naturally from what Art has been, whereas the new work of art is beautiful by being what Art has never been; and to measure it by the standard of the past is to measure it by a standard on the rejection of which its real perfection depends.
— Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism
In art, questions are always more interesting than answers.
— Marcus Berkmann, Set Phasers to Stun: 50 Years of Star Trek
In the psychology of aesthetics, there is a name for the moment between the anxiety of confronting something new and the satisfying click of understanding it. It is called an 'aesthetic aha.
— Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
Art is a game. Poetry as well. At the end of the day, you either know how to play it or not.
— Leila Samarrai, Avanture Borisa K.
As the sun dipped beneath the horizon, the clouds overhead blushed cotton-candy pink. Their reflections gleamed on the crystalline waters of Lake Lyn. The horses whinnied, the birds chirped, and Simon and Isabelle crunched their peanut brittle and popcorn. This, Simon thought, was the sound of happiness.
— Cassandra Clare, Tales from the Shadowhunter Academy
I am art. I am authentic. I am love. I am me.
— Malebo Sephodi
You want to feel that you belong to something higher, to something even beyond this universe, then go to the opera!
— Mehmet Murat ildan
An artist is a man who digests his own subjective impressions and knows how to find a general objective meaning in them, and how to express them in a convincing form.
— Maxim Gorky
What is more boundless than imagination? What is more primordial than the art of creation? To create and be creative is perhaps our most essential nature.
— Atalina Wright, Unbound
In every situation, at the beginning or end of the workday, you have a choice. You can look back or you can look forward. My advice: look forward. Always think about the next day. Don't go into the studio thinking, 'Hmmm, let's see what I was doing yesterday?' It takes more energy to twist yourself around and look back that it does to face forward.
— Twyla Tharp, The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life
Just as art is art regardless of the colors, a human being is so regardless of race.
— Dr. Jacinta Mpalyenkana, Ph.D, MBA
It is ten per cent how you draw, and ninety per cent what you draw.
— Andrew Loomis
The very first thing I remember in my early childhood is a flame, a blue flame jumping off a gas stove somebody lit... I remember being shocked by the whoosh of the blue flame jumping off the burner, the suddenness of it... I saw that flame and felt that hotness of it close to my face. I felt fear, real fear, for the first time in my life. But I remember it also like some kind of adventure, some kind of weird joy, too. I guess that experience took me someplace in my head I hadn't been before... The fear I had was almost like an invitation, a challenge to go forward into something I knew nothing about. That's where I think my personal philosophy of life and my commitment to everything I believe in started... In my mind I have always believed and thought since then that my motion had to be forward, away from the heat of that flame.
— Miles Davis, Miles: The Autobiography
What's that?' Thaniel said, curious. The postmarks and stamps weren't English or Japanese.'A painting. There's a depressed Dutchman who does countryside scenes and flowers and things. It's ugly, but I have to maintain the estates in Japan and modern art is a good investment.
— Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
Mori made an unwilling sound. 'I don't like Western art.''No look at this.' He lifted it from its package. It wasn't heavy. 'It's clever, it looks like busy Mozart.''What?''I . . .' Thaniel sighed. 'I see sound. Mozart looks like this. You know. Fast strings.''See? In front of you?''Yes. I'm not mad.''I didn't think so. All sounds?''Yes.
— Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street
Creativity is a state of mind, a way of being, and it comes from a sacred place within.
— Bonnie Kelso, Vitalize Your Creative Life
Cutting down a wall, the wall sawyer could feel the tension in a home ease and something windy rush in circles round her feet. It was addictive, each a sweet victory of art. The tumbling motion of a falling wall was like a volcanic eruption fading into a mountain of roses. The wall sawyer felt a loving animosity toward walls. “You must pay attention to your obsessions, where life and love intersect,” she told the little queen. 
— Meia Geddes, The Little Queen
You draw characters speaking loud and clear but you’re not hearing them.
— Basma Salem, The Art Of Black
To require perfection is to invite paralysis.
— David Bayles, Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking
Solve problems, make art, think deeply.
— Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
Culture, then, only truly becomes culture when it is embodied in someone.
— László Krasznahorkai, Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportage
In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, being an artist is an excuse for a form of behavior.
— William Faulkner, Mosquitoes
As a student I thought there was a formula of some kind that I would get hold of somewhere, and thereby become and artist. There is a formula, but it has not been in books. It is really plain old courage, standing on one's own feet, and forever seeking enlightenment; courage to develop your way, but learning from the other fellow; experimentation with your own ideas, observing for yourself, a rigid discipline of doing over that which you can improve.
— Andrew Loomis, Figure Drawing for All It's Worth
To spend time observing, without drawing, thinking, without drawing, or feeling, without drawing, is the misfortune of nonartists.
— Nick Meglin, Drawing from Within: Unleashing Your Creative Potential
I have never found a book that stressed the importance of myself as a caretaker of my ability, of staying healthy mentally and physically, or that gave me an inkling that my courage might be strained to the utmost.
— Andrew Loomis, Figure Drawing for All It's Worth
Even the girl he'd danced with had thought it was some marvelous trick. She had been enveloped in real, bright fire and she had tipped back her head and laughed, the tumble of her black hair becoming a crackling waterfall of light, the heels of her shoes striking sparks like glittering leaping dust all over the floor, her skirt trailing flame as if he were following a phoenix tail. Magnus had spun and swung with her, and she'd thought he was marvelous for a single moment of bright illusion. But, like love, fire didn't last.
— Cassandra Clare, The Bane Chronicles
Learning stamps you with it's moments. Childhood's learning is made up of moments. It isn't steady. It's a pulse.
— Eudora Welty, On Writing
Despite dreaming about making a living through his art, the real potential of becoming An Artist Nobody Likes was far, far scarier than remaining An Artist Nobody’s Heard Of. At least he was comfortable with and used to being An Artist Nobody’s Heard Of.
— Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life
Saturday-morning cartoon sure aren't what they used to be. The animation is lazy. Too clean. He misses being able to detect pencil lines and paint strokes in his favorite cartoon characters, his mind never quite separating the creatures from the art that brought them to life.
— Kara Lee Corthron, The Truth of Right Now
He gave us music that reached into the ear like a lover's tongue and changed the color of our feelings. He presented movement so exquisite and fluid it coaxed our souls out of our bodies to dance with him, weightless in the perfume of divinity.
— Katie Waitman, The Merro Tree
For J.-L.G., color does not exist simply to show us that a girl has blue eyes or that a certain gentleman is a member of the Legion of Honor. By necessity, a film by Godard that offers the possibility of color is going to show us something that could not be shown in black and white, a kind of voice that cannot resound ehen colors are mute.
— Aragon
In Europe, being an artist is a form of behavior; in America, it's an excuse for a form of behavior.
— William Faulkner, Mosquitoes
Every time she meets him, she feels like he was a new paper ready to be drawn. And she could clearly remember how the first time she met him, he was like a sketch paper filled with grey and blue and black, all mixed up together forming a confusing storm,
— Basma Salem, The Art Of Black
And she could clearly remember how the first time she met him, he was like a sketch paper filled with grey and blue and black, all mixed up together forming a confusing storm, the second time she met him was like red and orange and everything that burned, the third time it was raining and it felt like the storm would never end. And she felt right now that the storm is ending. When he took his glasses off and she saw the sadness in his eyes, and she could clearly see how the storm is going to leave soon, but yet leaving behind it broken pieces and shattered glasses.
— Basma Salem, The Art Of Black
It just feels like meeting him again was like seeing a blank paper ready to be sketched, a different idea to be drawn.
— Basma Salem, The Art Of Black
The assertion that only sex is power and the arrogation of creativity to the masculine sex and the rendering of all creativity as sexual—this is patriarchal aesthetics. Patriarchal passion sees violent sex as the essential creative act, even aesthetically, through a sort of metaphysical transubstantiation. This is their romantic belief that sex with the Master can produce the artistic spirit in the student. Male creativity is thus born in another, her work is given depth through the violent transgression of her boundaries.
— Somer Brodribb, Nothing Mat(t)ers: A Feminist Critique of Postmodernism
I am an art work in constant progress; I am my own canvas, my own colors, my own brushes and my own inspiration.
— Efrat Cybulkiewicz
I have made up my mind that I will never marry. I shall be wedded to my art.
— L.M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs
William, an artist is someone who combines a desperate need to be understood with the fiercest love of privacy-
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
Modern man has lost the sense of wonderabout the unknown and he treats it asan enemy.
— Laurens van der Post, Patterns of Renewal
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than their, it is because they are made with ideas.
— G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
Patterns cannot be weighed or measured. Patterns must be mapped.
— Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems
We form a mental map, and then that shape, shapes us
— Lois Farfel Stark, The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times
I thought of the cool, fresh air of the city I'd always dreamed of living in. The art museums and trolleys and the mysterious fog that blanketed it. I could almost smell the cappuccinos I'd planned to drink in bohemian cafes or hear the indie music in the bookstores I would spend my free time in. I pictured the friends I'd make, my kindred art people, and the dorm room I was supposed to move into.
— Heather Demetrios, I'll Meet You There
You are my other self
— Dagara Tribe Member
Like a spider in its web, a vibration anywhereis felt everywhere.
— Lois Farfel Stark, The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times
SEE what you think.
— Lois Farfel Stark, The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times
We shouldn’t abbreviate the truth but rather get a new method of presentation.
— Edward Tufte
Life did not take over the world by combat,but by networking.
— Lynn Margulis, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution
No "knack" of drawing heads can compete with sound knowledge.
— Andrew Loomis, Drawing the Head and Hands
The value is not in the art, whether there are more artists or less artists, the value depends on it.
— Dada Bhagwan
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of poems. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas.
— G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
His eyeless skull took in the line of costumes, the waxy debris of the makeup table. His empty nostrils snuffed up the mixed smells of mothballs, grease, and sweat. There was something here, he thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape. And yet... and yet... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from - hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in.
— Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sisters
I've never been somewhere I belonged, but there are places where I think I could be happy. Like San Francisco. Well, do art museums count? Because I feel like I belong in them.
— Heather Demetrios, I'll Meet You There
My eyes roved over the walls covered with my collages and prints of famous paintings. Magritte, Kandinsky, Kahlo. My origami shapes hung from fishing wire, dangling over my bed. They shivered in the slight breeze blowing through my open window. It was my own little escape pod, but none of it was enough tonight.
— Heather Demetrios, I'll Meet You There
Living in new shapes, reshapes our thinking
— Lois Farfel Stark, The Telling Image: Shapes of Changing Times
One can show one's contempt for the cruelty and stupidity of the world by making of one's life a poem of incoherence and absurdity.
— Alfred Jarry, Selected Works
Life is a living flute, yoga is the art of creating melody and rhythm in it.
— Amit Ray, Yoga The Science of Well-Being
Don't go to a museum with a destination. Museums are wormholes to other worlds. They are ecstasy machines.
— Jerry Saltz
In any first-class work of art, you can find passages that in themselves are extremely boring, but try to cut them out, as they are in an abridged edition, and you lose the life of the work. Don't think that art that is alive can remain on the same level of interest throughout — and the same is true of life.
— W.H. Auden, Lectures on Shakespeare
The impossible is what we achieve through art.
— Eirene Evripidou
Eros and Thanatos were always the source of his inspiration, even though, from this time on, they usually appear in the guise of two simple and fundamental themes: flowers and women. These themes offered him the greatest opportunity to give a certain permanence to all that can be grasped in passing: an ephemeral sensual joy, the ecstasy of life.
— Gilles Néret, Gustav Klimt: 1862-1918
The crucial job of artists is to find a way to release materials into the animated middle ground between subjects, and so to initiate the difficult but joyful process of human connection.
— Ann Lauterbach, The Topography of Tears
You think that I am naive, but it is you who are naive. You have no idea what is happening inside of you when you look at a painting. You think that you are getting close to art voluntarily, enticed by its beauty, that this intimacy is taking place in an atmosphere of freedom and that delight is being born in you spontaneously, lured by the divine rod of Beauty. In truth, a hand has grabbed you by the scruff of the neck, led you to this painting and has thrown you to your knees. A will mightier than your own told you to attempt to experience the appropriate emotions. Whose hand and whose will? That hand is not the hand of a single man, the will is collective, born in an interhuman dimension, quite alien to you. So you do not admire at all, you merely try to admire.
— Witold Gombrowicz, Diary
Some elements appear in this picture which would be decisive in Klimt's subsequent work: for instance, the use of gold and the transformation of anatomy into ornamentation, of ornamentation into anatomy.
— Gilles Néret, Gustav Klimt: 1862-1918
To fall in love with pain is to fall in love with art.
— Dominic Riccitello
Let us summarize these three points more concisely:(a) The rejection of art as a mere emotional, individualistic, and romantic affair.(b) “Objective” work, undertaken with the silent hope that the end product will nevertheless eventually be regarded as a work of art.(c) Consciously goal-directed work in architecture, which will have a concise artistic effect on the basis of well-preparated objective-scientific criteria.Such an architecture will actively raise the general standard of living. This represents the dialectic of our development process, which purports to arrive at the affirmative by negation — a process similar to melting down old iron and forging it into new steel.
— El Lissitzky
As once-colonized nations seek to stand on their own, the countries once denuded of their past seek to assert their independent identities through the objects that tie them to it. The demand for restitution is a way to reclaim history, to assert a moral imperative over those who were once overlords. Those countries still in the shadow of more powerful empires seek to claim the symbols of antiquity and colonialism to burnish their own national mythmaking.
— Sharon Waxman, Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World
As cultural politics change, museums change with them.
— Sharon Waxman, Loot: The Battle over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World