Art Quotes

An enormous part of our mature experience cannot not be expressed in words.

Alfred North Whitehead

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing, as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde

Thou art the Mars of malcontents.

William Shakespeare, "The Merry Wives of Windsor", Act 1 scene 3

The thing that is incredible is life itself. Why should we be here in this sun - Illuminated universe? Why should there be green earth under our feet?

Edwin Markham

Art strives for form, and hopes for beauty.

Rose Elizabeth Bird

The man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at forty he has no head.

Aristide Briand

The holiest of holidays are those Kept by ourselves in silence and apart The secret anniversaries of the heart.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

If the Prince of Peace should come to earth, one of the first things he would do would be to put psychiatrists in their place.

Aldous Huxley

When you start to doubt yourself, the real world will eat you alive.

Henry Rollins, From his song "Shine".

A bodily disease which we look upon as whole and entire within itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual part.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The bad teacher imposes his ideas and his methods on his pupils, and such originality as they may have is lost in the second - Rate art of imitation.

Stephen Neill

Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

Terry Pratchett, Hogfathe

Noble be man, Helpful and good! For that alone Sets him apart From every other creature On earth.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832), from The Divine, 1783

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our own particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

E. M. Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951

Just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage, or my house when I propose to take a residence, so I shall choose my death when I am about to depart from life.

Seneca, Epistulae Morales

There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret, Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

Sigmund Freud

Rest assured that there is nothing which wounds the heart of a noble man more deeply than the thought his honour is assailed.

Moliere

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

Lydia M. Child

When the waves are round me breaking, As I pace the deck alone, And my eye in vain is seekingSome green leaf to rest uponWhat would not I give to wanderWhere my old companions dwellAbsence makes the heart grow fonder, Isle of Beauty, fare thee well.

John Milton

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

Samuel Johnson

Conversation is an art in which a man has all mankind for his competitors, for it is that which all are practising every day while they live.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all year.

Charles Dickens

Without freedom, no art art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.

Albert Camus

A dream can be nurtured over years and years and then flourish rapidly.... Be patient. It will happen for you. Sooner or later, life will get weary of beating on you and holding the door shut on you, and then it will let you in and throw you a real party.

Les Brown

We are the men of intrinsic value, who can strike our fortunes out of ourselves, whose worth is independent of accidents in life, or revolutions in government we have heads to get money, and hearts to spend it.

George Farquha

The art of life is to show your hand. There is no diplomacy like candor. You may lose by it now and then, but it will be a loss well gained if you do. Nothing is so boring as having to keep up a deception.

E. V. Lucas

What an absurd thing it is to pass over all the valuable parts of a man, and fix our attention on his infirmities.

Joseph Addison

It never pays to deal with the flyweights of the world. They take far too much pleasure in thwarting you at every turn.

Sue Grafton

Poetry is an art, and chief of the fine arts; the easiest to dabble in, the hardest to reach true perfection.

E. C. Stedman

Misanthropes need people without a steady supply, the misanthrope cannot fully apply his art.

Polly Whitney

A lie travels farther than the truth.

Irish Prove

What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.

W. H. Auden

Modesty is a shining light; it prepares the mind to receive knowledge, and the heart for truth.

Madam Guizot

The bad fortune of the good turns their faces up to heaven; the good fortune of the bad bows their heads down to the earth.

Saadi

All art is but imitation of nature.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca

He is not dead who departs from life with a high and noble fame; but he is dead, even while living, whose brow is branded with infamy.

Tieck