It is the response of man's creative soul
to the call of the Real.
-Rabindranath Tagore
What is any art but a mold
in which to imprison for a moment
the shining, elusive element which is life itself -
-Willa Cather
The central point of the work of art is the work as origin,
the point
which cannot be reached,
yet the only one which is worth reaching.
-Maurice Blanchot
The aim of an artist is not to solve a problem irrefutably,
but to make people love life
in all its countless, inexhaustible manifestations.
-Leo Tolstoy
The world speaks to me in colors,
my soul answers in music.
-Rabindranath Tagore
Music and color to the mind
are as air and light to the body.
-Plato
All music is a rainbow!
-Pablo Casals
But art?
It is pure and intense play,
So it is like pure and intense life,
So it is like pure and intense fire.
You see the coal burning.
-Antonio Machado
The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire,
and before art is born,
the artist must be ready to be consumed
by the fire of his own creation.
-August Rodin
I believe that every work of art,
whether it is the work of great genius, or something very small,
comes to the artist and says, "Here I am. Enflesh me.
Give birth to me."
-Madeleine L'Engle
The position of the artist is humble.
He is essentially a channel.
-Piet Mondrian
I succeeded in simply attending
at the birth of all my works.
-Max Ernst
What is art
but a way of seeing?
-Thomas Berger
It is the function of art to renew our perception.
What we are familiar with we cease to see.
-Anais Nin
Art is not what you see,
but what you make others see.
-Edgar Degas
Only through art can we emerge from ourselves
and know what another person sees.
-Marcel Proust
The understanding of art
depends finally on one's willingness to extend one's humanity
and one's knowledge of human life.
-Ralph Ellison
A true artist is always out of his time.
-Alejandro Jodorowsky
A great artist is always
before his time or behind it.
-George Edward Moore
Architecture is ...
life itself taking form.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
Space has always been
the spiritual dimension of architecture.
-Arthur Erickson
I call architecture
frozen music.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Music is the best means we have of digesting time.
-Igor Stravinsky
It had never occurred to me before
that music and thinking are so much alike.
In fact, you could say
music is another way of thinking,
or maybe thinking is another kind of music.
-Ursula K. Le Guin
All forms of art
are consciousness expanders.
-Madeleine L'Engle
A verbal art like poetry is reflective.
It stops to think.
Music is immediate, it goes on to become.
-W. H. Auden
The purpose of truly transcendent art
is to express something you are not yet,
but that you can become.
-Alex Grey
Music is Love in search of a word.
-Sidney Lanier
Music expresses that which cannot be said
and on which it is impossible to be silent.
-Victor Hugo
Music is the poetry of the air.
-Johann Paul Friedrich Richter
Music is grace made audible.
-David Hayward
The highest graces of music
flow from the feelings of the heart.
-Nathaniel Emmons
A great work of art is like a dream;
for all its apparent obviousness,
it does not explain itself and is always ambiguous.
-Carl Jung
True art selects and paraphrases,
but seldom gives verbatim translation.
-Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The dance is a poem
of which each movement is a word.
-Mata Hari
Dancing is the poetry of the foot.
-John Dryden
Do you not realise
that dance is the pure act of metamorphosis?
-Paul Valery
Dance my heart!
dance today with joy.
-Kabir
Dance until the stars come down from the rafters.
-W. H. Auden
Theatre takes place all the time
wherever one is.
-John Cage
The play's the thing.
-William Shakespeare
Our whole life is like a play.
-Ben Jonson
What we play is life.
-Louis Armstrong
All men practice the actor's art.
-Caius Petronius Arbiter
Art is a form of catharsis.
-Dorothy Parker
Art washes away from the soul
the dust of everyday life.
-Pablo Picasso
Great artists have no country.
-Alfred de Musset
An artist's sphere of influence is the world.
-Carl Maria von Weber
Beautiful buildings are more than scientific.
They are true organisms, spiritually conceived,
works of art using the best technology.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
Buildings, too, are children of Earth and Sun.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
We shape our buildings;
thereafter they shape us.
-Winston Churchill
Architecture is like a mythical fantastic.
It has to be be experienced.
It can't be described.
We can draw it up and we can make models of it,
but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.
-Maya Lin
Art is not a thing;
it is a way.
-Elbert Hubbard
Art is neither a profession nor a hobby.
Art is a way of being.
-Frederick Franck
One must first be a human being.
All true art grows out of that which is distinctly human.
-Edvard Grieg
Art seems to me to be
a state of the soul more than anything else.
-Marc Chagall
The dancer's body is simply
the luminous manifestation of the soul.
-Isadora Duncan
Except for the point,
the still point,
there would be no dance,
and there is only the dance.
-T. S. Eliot
He is the true artist
whose life is his material.
-Henry David Thoreau
In my music, I'm trying to play the truth of what I am.
The reason it's difficult is because I'm changing all the time.
-Charlie Mingus
All arts we practice are apprenticeship.
The big art is our life.
-M.C. Richards
All art is concerned
with coming into being.
-Aristotle
But if you have nothing at all to create, then perhaps you create yourself. -Carl Jung
One should either be a work of art
or wear a work of art.
-Oscar Wilde
There's no reason not to consider the world
one gigantic painting.
-Robert Rauschenberg
I could paint for a hundred years,
a thousand years without stopping
and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.
-Paul Cezanne
I always photographed
what the moment told me.
-Andre Kertesz
The very best pictures
adapt themselves
to many changes in meaning.
-John Swarkowski
One should photograph objects,
not only for what they are,
but for what else they are.
-Minor White
The purpose of art
is nothing less than the upliftment
of the human spirit.
-Pope John Paul II
The artist enriches the soul of humanity.
-Auguste Rodin
The real actor has a direct line
to the collective heart.
-Bette Davis
All fine architectural values are human values,
else not valuable.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
Architecture is the concrete presentment in space
of the soul of a people.
-Claude Bragdon
Architecture is the will of an age
conceived in spatial terms.
-Mies van der Rohe
To express that which is within you with sincerity,
in the clearest and most perfect manner,
would seem to me always the ultimate goal of art.
-Gabriel Faure
Song is somehow the very central essence of us...
as if all the rest were but wrapping and hulls.
-Thomas Carlyle
Good acting comes
from finding the essence of a character.
-John Larroquette
Acting is a question of absorbing
other people's personalities
and adding some of your own experience.
-Jean-Paul Sartre
As picture teaches colouring,
so sculpture the anatomy of form.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
I say that the art of sculpture
is eight times as great as any other art based on drawing
because a statue has eight views
and they must all be equally good.
-Benvenuto Cellini
Layer by layer art strips life bare.
-Robert Musil
Art is coming face to face
with yourself.
-Jackson Pollock
You use a glass mirror to see your face;
you use works of art to see your soul.
-George Bernard Shaw
The camera always points both ways.
In expressing your subject,
you also express yourself.
-Freeman Patterson
There are always two people
in every picture:
the photographer and the viewer.
-Ansel Adams
The important thing
is not the camera but the eye.
-Alfred Eisenstaedt
For me, photography is to place
head, heart and eye along the same line of sight
-Henri Cartier-Bresson
Fine art is that in which
the hand, the head, and the heart of man go together.
-John Ruskin
The highest condition of art
is artlessness.
-Henry David Thoreau
True art does not reveal its skill.
-Li Bo
Sculpture is the art of thinking in shapes.
-Herbert Samuel
A sculptor is a person
obsessed with the form and shape of things.
-Henry Moore
Sculpture is quite simply
the art of depression and protuberance.
-Auguste Rodin
A painter paints pictures on canvas.
But musicians paint their pictures on silence.
-Leopold Stokowski
Music and rhythm
find their way into the secret places of the soul.
-Plato
See deep enough and you see musically;
the heart of Nature being everywhere music...
-Thomas Carlyle
Music is the universal language of mankind.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Music begins where the possibilities of language end.
-Jean Sibelius
Music, because of its specific and far-reaching metaphorical powers,
can name the unnameable and comunicate the unknowable.
-Leonard Bernstein
My favorite piece of music
is the one we hear all the time if we are quiet.
-John Cage
The sole art that suits me
is that which, rising from unrest,
tends toward serenity.
-Andre Gide
The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness. -Max Eastman
Art is the marriage
of the conscious and the unconscious.
-Jean Cocteau
Art is the affirmation of life.
-Alfred Stieglitz
Art is the great stimulus to life.
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Art is your heart's blood.
-Edvard Munch
Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.
-Martha Graham
Drawing is a discipline
by which I constantly discover the world.
-Frederick Franck
I rarely draw what I see.
I draw what I feel in my body.
-Barbara Hepworth
Drama is based on the Mistake.
-W. H. Auden
The structure of a play
is always the story of how the birds came home to roost.
-Arthur Miller
Art attracts us only by what it reveals
of our most secret self.
-Jean-Luc Godard
The art of a people
is the true mirror to their minds.
-Jawaharlal Nehru
The truest expression of a people
is in its dance and its music.
-Agnes de Mille
Art always reaches its peak
where it becomes the life interest of a people.
-Stefan Zweig
Art does not reproduce the visible; rather, it makes visible. -Paul Klee
Fine art is knowledge made visible.
-Gustave Courbet
The object isn't to make art,
it's to be in that wonderful state
which makes art inevitable.
-Robert Henri
The purpose of art
is the lifelong construction
of a state of wonder.
-Glenn Gould
Art is indeed
not the bread but the wine of life.
-Johann Paul Friedrich Richter
The arts form bridges
between the material realities and the inner realities.
-Manly Hall
All art is at once surface and symbol.
-Oscar Wilde
Great works of art
say all that can be said about man and the world,
and then convey that there is something more
that cannot be known.
Every masterpiece has this quality of mystery.
-Auguste Rodin
There is only one valuable thing in art:
the thing you cannot explain.
-Georges Braque
Every work of art which really moves us
is in some degree a revelation:
it changes us.
-Lawren Harris
Significant images render insights
beyond speech,
beyond the kinds of meaning
speech defines.
-Joseph Campbell
Music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all,
but you are the music
While the music lasts.
-T. S. Eliot
Away from the earth! -
getting lighter than air! -
this is the key to dancing.
-Joost A. M. Meerloo
The nearer a writer gets to life,
the greater he becomes as an artist.
-Stephen Crane
The great artist is the simplifier.
-Henri Frederic Amiel
The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude. -Friedrich Nietzsche
Art comes to you
proposing frankly to give you
nothing but the highest quality
to your moments as they pass.
-Walter Pater
A good snapshot stops the moment
from running away.
-Eudora Welty
Of all forms of expression,
photography is the only one
which seizes the instant in its flight.
-Henri Cartier-Bresson
Art is a form of supremely delicate awareness...
meaning at-oneness,
the state of being at one with the object.
-D. H. Lawrence
In our life there is a single color on the artist's palette,
which provides the meaning of life and art.
It is the color of love.
-Marc Chagall
Art is an elastic sort of love.
-Josephine Baker
I like to think of music
as an emotional science.
-George Gershwin
Music is the shorthand of emotion. -Leo Tolstoy
Music is the tonal analogue of emotive life.
-Susanne Langer
Music deepens the emotions
and harmonizes them with each other.
-Aurobindo Ghose
Music is a means of rapid transportation.
-John Cage
What passion cannot Music raise and quell?
-John Dryden
On with the dance!
Let joy be unconfined.
-George Gordon Byron
I see dance being used as communication
between body and soul,
to express what is too deep, too fine for words.
-Ruth St. Denis
To be an artist,
you need to play inside your work.
-Alejandro Jodorowsky
A great artist is a great man in a great child.
-Victor Hugo
Artists are the antennae of the race.
-Ezra Pound
Art is always and everywhere the secret confession,
and at the same time the immortal movement of its time.
-Karl Marx
The real function of the artist
is to give fresh vision to their own generation.
-Doris McCarthy
Art is an accurate statement
of the time in which it is made.
-Robert Mapplethorpe
The art of one period cannot be approached
through the attitudes (emotional or intellectual) of another.
-Louise Bogan
Every great architect is - necessarily - a great poet.
He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
Art is our chief means
of breaking bread with the dead.
-W. H. Auden
Insight is the first condition of Art.
-George Henry Lewes
To any artist worth of the name,
all in nature is beautiful
because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth,
read there, as an open book, all the inner truth.
-Auguste Rodin
An artist is Nature's confidant.
Trees and plants talk to him like friends.
-Auguste Rodin
Art, used collectively for
painting, sculpture, architecture and music,
is the mediatress between, and the reconciler of,
nature and man.
-Samuel Taylor Coleridge
A structure becomes architectural, and not sculptural,
when its elements no longer have their justification in nature.
-Guillaume Apollinaire
Vitality is radiated
from exceptional art and architecture.
-Arthur Erickson
A real building is one on which the eye can light
and stay lit.
-Ezra Pound
My trade and my art is living. -Michel de Montaigne
Art is my life
and my life is art.
-Yoko Ono
It is the artist's business to create sunshine
when the sun fails.
-Romain Rolland
The great actors are the luminous ones.
They are the great conductors on the stage.
-Minnie Maddern Fiske
An actor should be able to create the universe
in the palm of his hand.
-Laurence Stern
The artist vocation
is to send light into the human heart.
-George Sand
A genuine work of art must mean many things;
the truer its art, the more things it will mean.
-George MacDonald
Why do you try to understand art?
Do you try to understand the song of a bird?
-Pablo Picasso
After silence,
that which comes nearest
to expressing the inexpressible
is music.
-Aldous Huxley
All music is what awakens from you
when you are reminded by the instruments.
-Walt Whitman
A violinist had a violin, a painter his palette.
All I had was myself.
I was the instrument that I must care for.
-Josephine Baker
The real message of the Dance
opens up the vistas of life
to all who have the urge to express beauty
with no other instrument than their own bodies,
with no apparatus and no dependence
on anything other than space.
-Ruth St. Denis
Drawing, within the visual arts, seems to hold the position of being closest to pure thought. -John Elderfield
A work of art
is above all an adventure of the mind.
-Eugene Ionesco
An artist's only concern
is to shoot for some kind of perfection,
and on his own terms, not anyone else's.
-J. D. Salinger
Silence is, after all, the context for the deepest appreciation of art:
the only important evaluations are finally, personal, interior ones.
-Robert Adams
Art enables us
to find ourselves and lose ourselves
at the same time.
-Thomas Merton
When the artist loses himself in his art,
then the art comes to life.
-Hazrat Inayat Khan
Painting is the mind realizing itself in colour.
-Robert Motherwell
If I could say it in words
there would be no reason to paint.
-Edward Hopper
Painting is the silence of thought
and the music of sight.
-Orhan Pamuk
We composers are projectors
of the infinite into the finite.
-Edvard Grieg
The artist should be intoxicated with the idea of the thing
he wants to express.
-Robert Henri
The work of art
which I do not make,
none other will ever make it.
-Simone Weil
In my art I have tried to explain to myself life and its meaning.
I have also tried to help others to clarify their lives.
-Edvard Munch
It is human nature to want to exchange ideas,
and I believe that, at bottom,
every artist wants no more than to tell the world
what he has to say.
-M. C. Escher
Music is powered by ideas.
If you don't have clarity of ideas,
you're just communicating sheer sound.
-Yo-Yo Ma
Art consists in making others feel what we feel.
-Fernando Pessoa
A work of art is one through which
the consciousness of the artist
is able to give its emotions
to anyone who is prepared to receive them.
-Muriel Rukeyser
Art is the objectification of feeling
and the subjectification of nature.
-Susanne Langer
All musicians
are subconsciously mathematicians.
-Thelonius Monk
Music at times is more like perfume than mathematics.
-Gabriel Marcel
A building is not just a place to be.
It is a way to be.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
Space and light and order.
Those are the things that men need
just as much as they need
bread or a place to sleep.
-Le Corbusier
Space is the breath of art.
-Frank Lloyd Wright
What art offers is space -
a certain breathing room for the spirit.
-John Updike
I saw the angel in the marble
and carved until I set him free.
-Michelangelo
The only thing one can give an artist
is leisure in which to work.
To give an artist leisure
is actually to take part in his creation.
-Ezra Pound
Art enlarges experience
by admitting us to the inner life of others.
-Walter Lippmann
A work of art is a world in itself
reflecting senses and emotions
of the artist's world.
-Hans Hofmann
Every good painter paints what he is.
-Jackson Pollock
When I paint, I try to get to the summit of my soul,
and I paint from there, where the universe sings.
-Lawren Harris
I dream my painting,
and then I paint my dream.
-Vincent van Gogh
Inside you there's an artist you don't know about.
He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.
-August Rodin
An artist reveals his naked soul in his word.
-Ayn Rand
Art is the concrete expression
of our most subtle feelings.
-Agnes Martin
Art is the creation
of forms symbolic of human feeling.
-Susanne Langer
The artist does not see things as they are,
but as he is.
-Alfred Tonnelle
A work of art is the unique result
of a unique temperament.
-Oscar Wilde
A work of art is a corner of creation
seen through a temperament.
-Emile Zola
Art is the most intense mode of individualism
that the world has known.
-Oscar Wilde
Art flourishes when there is a sense of adventure.
-Alfred North Whitehead
In music the passions enjoy themselves. -Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Music is the outburst of the soul.
-Frederick Delius
If you ask me what I came to do in this world,
I, an artist, I will answer you
"I am here to live out loud."
-Emile Zola
Life seems to go on without effort,
when I am filled with music.
-George Eliot
Color is the most relative medium in art.
-Josef Albers
I try to apply colors
like words that shape poems,
like notes that shape music.
-Joan Miro
The artist is the seer.
He is the man whose eyes are open
and to whose spirit the inner essence of things
is made known, at any rate, as a fact of existence.
-Auguste Rodin
My paintings are not about what is seen.
They are about what is known
forever in the mind.
-Agnes Martin
Art can only be truly art
by presenting an adequate outward symbol
of some fact in the interior life.
-Margaret Fuller
The aim of art is to represent
not the outward appearance of things,
but their inner significance.
-Aristotle
The modern pantheist
not only sees the god in everything,
he takes photographs.
-D. H. Lawrence
I have always thought that,
of all the arts,
the cinema is the most complete art.
-Alejandro Jodorowsky
If it can be written, or thought,
it can be filmed.
-Stanley Kubrick
I didn't want to make cinema so a person forgets himself and has a lot of fun.
'I forget myself. I am a poor little consumer.'
I wanted to make a picture where someone who sees it says,
'This is me! This is me!'
-Alejandro Jodorowsky
If art reflects life,
it does so with special mirrors.
-Bertolt Brecht
Art is a lie that makes us realize truth,
at least the truth that is given us to understand.
-Pablo Picasso
Of all lies, art is the least untrue.
-Gustave Flaubert
And perhaps art is for us liars
the means of expressing the most imperative truths
in a roundabout way.
-Oscar Milosz
In painting you must give the idea of the true
by means of the false.
-Edgar Degas
The soul of art is inspiration.
-Ginia A. Davis
The purpose of art is to inspire.
-Bob Dylan
There are a lot of good pieces
still to be written in C Major.
-Arnold Schoenberg
Art is one of the means of unifying people.
-Leo Tolstoy
The true principle of art is the principle of unity.
-Rabindranath Tagore
Works of art are an infinite solitude.
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Art is the apotheosis of solitude.
-Samuel Beckett
The artist after all is a solitary being.
-Virginia Woolf
Who hears music,
feels his solitude peopled at once.
-Robert Browning
Architecture, of all the arts,
is the one which acts the most slowly,
but the most surely,
on the soul.
-Ernest Dimnet
True architecture exists
only where man stands in the center.
-Alvar Aalto
Works of art must persist
as objects of contemplation.
-Herbert Read
Art is not a study of positive reality,
it is the seeking for ideal truth.
-John Ruskin
We want Realism's wealth of experience
and Symbolism's depth of feeling.
All art is a problem of balance between opposites.
-Cesare Pavese
Every artist writes his own autobiography.
-Henry Ellis
All art is autobiographical.
The pearl is the oyster's autobiography.
-Frederico Fellini
Painting is just another way
of keeping a diary.
-Pablo Picasso
Art is the tone of the voice;
it is personal and expresses the ego's relationship
to the unconscious.
-William Irwin Thompson
The artist's eternal but heavy task is to bring into form
that which assaults him from the depths of the psyche.
-Marie-Louise von Franz
The more a work of art is dictated directly by the
unconscious, the more it tends to take on a dreamlike form,
namely a symbolic, visionary character.
-Marie-Louise von Franz
A work of art does not answer questions, it provokes them;
and its central meaning is in the tension
between the contradictory answers.
-Leonard Bernstein
Great art is the expression of the solution of the conflict
between the demands of the world without and that within.
-Edith Hamilton
Art is order,
but it is made out of the chaos of life.
-May Sarton
Be careful that you do not write or paint anything
that is not your own, that you don't know in your soul.
-Emily Carr
Never strive, O artist,
to create what you are not
irresistibly impelled to create.
-Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
Dance is the song of the body.
-Martha Graham
Dance is the movement of the universe
concentrated in an individual.
-Isadora Duncan
Dancing is the loftiest,
the most moving,
the most beautiful of the arts,
because it is no mere translation
or abstraction from life,
it is life itself.
-Henry Havelock Ellis
Each of the great arts has its own appeal
and its own way of appeal
and each in its own way is supreme above all others.
-Auorbindo Ghose
There are three forms of visual art:
Painting is art to look at,
sculpture is art you can walk around,
and architecture is art you can walk through.
-Dan Rice
Thoroughly to know oneself,
is above all art,
for it is the highest art.
-Theologia Germanica
The greatest work on artist can create is the artistry performed upon himself. -Rabindranath Tagore
We are all sculptors and painters,
and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.
-Henry David Thoreau
Every artist dips his brush in his own soul,
and paints his own nature into his pictures.
-Henry Ward Beecher
You are the artist,
you are the raw material,
you are the work of art
and you are the reality
behind the work of art.
-Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan
We have our brush and colors - paint paradise and in we go. -Nikos Kazantzakis
When love and skill work together,
expect a masterpiece.
-Charles Reade
The true artist helps the world
by revealing mystic truths.
-Bruce Nauman
The man who never in his mind and thoughts
travel'd to heaven is no artist.
-William Blake
Art is Nature speeded up and God slowed down.
-Chazal
Art is the collaboration between God and artist
and the less the artist does the better.
-Andre Gide
The highest Art
is that by which an inspired and interpretative form
unseals the doors of the Spirit.
-Aurobindo Ghose
The true work of art
is but a shadow of the divine perfection.
-Michelangelo
