14,373 Quotes About Art

Art does not have to be dull, to be effective; the artist does not have to be a bore, to be real.

The philosophers write about things as they are and as they appear to be, but as an artist I find that appearance is everything.

Using your talent, hobby or profession in a way that makes you contribute with something good to this world is truly the way to go.

Long looking at paintings is equivalent to being dropped into a foreign city, where gradually, out of desire and despair, a few key words, then a little syntax make a clearing in the silence. Art... is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it familiar... We have to recognize that the language of art, all art, is not our mother-tongue.

If you cannot please everyone with your deeds and your art, please a few. To please many is bad.

It is necessary to keep one's compass in one's eyes and not in the hand, for the hands execute, but the eye judges.

The professional has learned that success, like happiness, comes as a by-product of work. The professional concentrates on the work and allows rewards to come or not come, whatever they like.

A steampunk nationBaby pollution rises up then the loving comes arraigning 'causeOur art's official and only partially artificialAnd our heart's in the middle of sharp hardened shards of metal butThere's not where it settlesBecause it's beating to the steaming of God's hottest pot or kettleAnd now we face it, this creation we made toTo save our craving for a synthetic rebelnation it'sOur safeway they make into a pathetic revelationIn our steampunk nationOur steampunk nation

The artist, and particularly the poet, is always an anarchist in the best sense of the word. He must heed only the call that arises within him from three strong voices: the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art.