Quotes

Art is much less important than life, but what a poor life without it.
-Robert Motherwell

There is no must in art because art is free.
-Wassily Kandinsky

Bad artists always admire each others work.
-Oscar Wilde

Art is what's left over after you've defined everything else.
-Michael Vitale

I shut my eyes in order to see.
-Paul Gauguin

Art is the window to man's soul. Without it, he would never be able to see beyond his immediate world; nor could the world see the man within.
-Claudia Lady Bird Johnson

Works of art are all that survive of incredibly gifted people.
-Peter C. Wilson

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.
-Emile Zola

It is through art and through art only that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
-Oscar Wilde

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.
-Oscar Wilde

The secret of life is in art.
-Oscar Wilde

Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.
-George Bernard Shaw

All art requires courage.
-Anne Tucker

Life imitates art far more than art imitates life.
-Oscar Wilde

For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.
-Vincent van Gogh

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.
-Thomas Merton

One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.
-Oscar Wilde

Art is essentially the affirmation, the blessing, and the deification of existence.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art.
-Konstantin Stanislavsky

Love of beauty is Taste. The creation of beauty is Art.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

The work of art may have a moral effect, but to demand moral purpose from the artist is to make him ruin his work.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Art is not a thing; it is a way.
-Elbert Hubbard

To a true artist only that face is beautiful which, quite apart from its exterior, shines with the truth within the soul.
-Mahatma Gandhi

In art the hand can never execute anything higher than the heart can inspire.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

There is one thing one has to have: either a soul that is cheerful by nature, or a soul made cheerful by work, love, art, and knowledge.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Art is never finished, only abandoned.
-Leonardo da Vinci

Love isn't an emotion or an instinct - it's an art.
-Mae West

It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
-Oscar Wilde

Art is the proper task of life.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.
-Eric Gill

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.
-Woody Allen

I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
-Vincent van Gogh

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.
-Oscar Wilde