Art Quotes

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

I feel within me a peace above all earthly dignities, a still and quiet conscience.

William Shakespeare

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

The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

Auguste Rodin

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

Visits always give pleasure, if not the arrival, the departure.

Portuguese Prove

Whatever is in any way beautiful hath its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself praise forms no part of it. So it is none the worse nor the better for being praised.

Marcus Aurelius Antoninus

I will have no man work for me who has not the capacity to become a partner.

James Cash Penney

A year from now you may wish you had started today.

Karen Lam

To know how to suggest is the art of teaching.

Henri Frdric Amiel

Luxury is the wolf at the door and its fangs are the vanities and conceits germinated by success. When an artist learns this, he knows where the danger is.

Tennessee Williams

Any great work of art... revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world - - The extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.

Leonard Bernstein

The adoration of his heart had been to her only as the perfume of a wild flower, which she had carelessly crushed with her foot in passing.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

In your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go and sheltered so may thrive and grow.

Louise Driscoll

We only part to meet again.

John Gay

ARCHITECTURE, n The art of how to waste space.

Philip Johnson

Be humble for you are made of earth. Be noble for you are made of stars.

Serbian Prove

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse, O Magazine, April 2003

We have art so that we shall not die of reality.

Nietzsche

Doubt is part of all religion. All the religious thinkers were doubters.

Isaac Bashevis Singer, New York Times Magazine, Mar. 12, 1978

Go tell the Spartans, Passerby, That here, obedient to their laws, We lie.

Simonides, Epitaph for the Spartans who fell at Thermopylae

Murder is unique in that it abolishes the party it injures, so that society has to take the place of the victim and on his behalf demand atonement or grant forgiveness; it is the one crime in which society has a direct interest.

W. H. Auden

I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at.

William Shakespeare, "Othello", Act 1 scene 1

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as soon as one part of your life starts looking up, another falls to pieces.

Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones Diary

A novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.

Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies

You can go a long way with a smile. You can go a lot farther with a smile and a gun.

Al Capone

I exhort you also to take part in the great combat, which is the combat of life, and greater than every other earthly combat.

Plato

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

Polly Whitney

Other things may change us, but we start and end with the family.

Anthony Brandt

Live as brave men and if fortune is adverse, front its blows with brave hearts.

Cicero

Friends will keep you sane, Love could fill your heart, A lover can warm your bed, But lonely is the soul without a mate.

David Pratt

Paradoxically though it may seem, it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art imitates life.

Oscar Wilde

The only charm of marriage is that it makes a life of deception necessary for both parties.

Oscar Wilde

If my heart can become pure and simple like that of a child, I think there probably can be no greater happiness than this.

Kitaro Nishida

In how many lives does love really play a dominant part The average taxpayer is no more capable of the grand passion than of a grand opera.

Israel Zangwill

The course of human history is determined, not by what happens in the skies, but what takes place in our hearts.

Sir Arthur Keith

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts - - The book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art.

John Ruskin