Art Quotes

"Art is the secret confessional of humanity."

"Art is long, life is short, and criticism is free."

"Art should reflect the truth of human experience."

"Art is the expression of the soul."

"Art preserves what time would erase."

"Rhetoric may do well enough at the bar and in the pulpit, but the true business of poetry is not to rhetoricise."

"We make out of the quarrel with ourselves poetry."

"A line will take us hours maybe; yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught."

"The work of art is above all a vehicle of thought."

"What portion of the world can the artist claim as his own?"

"The pen is mightier than the sword."

"Art is the voice of the soul."

"Art should refine the manners of men and awaken their higher nature."

"Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable."

"I love acting. It is so much more real than life."

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

"I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant."

"The supreme question about a work of art is out of how deep a life does it spring."

"Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an aesthetic purpose."

"Art should present beauty in a way that nature intended, not as we wish to see it."

"We must learn to find beauty in the imperfect and incomplete."

"Architecture speaks volumes about the character of those who build it."

"To be an artist is to accept perpetual dissatisfaction with one's work."

"Art exists not to console, but to illuminate the terrible truths we prefer to ignore."

"The artist must choose between pleasing the world and pleasing their conscience."

"Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with human feeling."

"If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally."

"A line will take us hours maybe; yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, our stitching and unstitching has been naught."

"Art is the effort of man to express, not to expose, himself."

"Who can distinguish the dancer from the dance, or separate the music from the musician?"