Art Quotes

"Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others."
~ Albert Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

"An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one."
~ Charles Horton Cooley, Life and the Student

"When one buys some of my artwork I hope it is because they will wish to learn from it and not because they think it will match their drapes!"
~ Christian Cardell Corbet, 1997

"The defining function of the artist is to cherish consciousness."
~ Max Eastman

"In art, all who have done something other than their predecessors have merited the epithet of revolutionary; and it is they alone who are masters."
~ Paul Gauguin

"Art is a step from what is obvious and well-known toward what is arcane and concealed."
~ Kahlil Gibran, "A Handful of Sand on the Shore"

"Sadistic excess attempts to reach roughly and by harshness what art reaches by fineness."
~ Percy Wynham Lewis, The Art of Being Ruled

"The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress."
~ Hendrik Willem Van Loon, The Arts

"Time extracts various values from a painter's work. When these values are exhausted the pictures are forgotten, and the more a picture has to give, the greater it is."
~ Henri Matisse, Notebooks

"I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free."
~ Michelangelo

"Un croquis vaut mieux quíun long discours."
Fr., "A picture is worth a thousand words."
~ Napoleon

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."
~ Friedrich Nietzsche

"All art is but imitation of nature."
~ Lucius Annaeus Seneca

"All that I desire to point out is the general principle that Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life."
~ Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Living", 1891