- “The following Discourse [on art, by Sir Joshua Reynolds] is particularly Interesting to Blockheads as it endeavours to prove that There is No such thing as Inspiration & that any Man of a plain Understanding may by Thieving from Others become a Mich Angelo.” ― William Blake
- “I know that life is busy and hard and that there’s crushing pressure to just settle down and get a real job and khaki pants and a haircut. But don’t. Please don’t. Please keep believing that life can be better, brighter, broader because of the art that you make. Please keep demonstrating the courage that it takes to swim upstream in a world that prefers putting away for retirement to putting pen to paper, that chooses practicality over poetry, that values you more for going to the gym than going to the deepest places in your soul. Please keep making your art for people like me, people who need the magic and imagination and honesty of great art to make the day-to-day world a little more bearable.” ― Shauna Niequist
- “We have a rich literature. But sometimes it’s a literature too ready to be neutralized, to be incorporated into the ambient noise. This is why we need the writer in opposition, the novelist who writes against power, who writes against the corporation or the state or the whole apparatus of assimilation. We’re all one beat away from becoming elevator music.” ― Don DeLillo, Conversations with Don DeLillo
- “The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the build environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted- all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it, take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic.” ― John Stilgoe
- “I had discovered the miraculous possibility that art holds out to us: to be a part of the world and to be removed from the world at the same time.” ― Sigrid Nunez, A Feather on the Breath of God
- “Make art and live simply.” ― Shawn Lukas
- Only when he no longer knows what he is doing does the painter do good things. Edgar Degas
- “L’étude du beau est un duel où l’artiste crie de frayeur avant d’être vaincu.” ― Charles Baudelaire, Petits Poemes En Prose
- “You were born an original work of art. Stay original.” ― Suzy Kassem
- “But why didn’t you just ask me?” I set down my fork and glare at her. “Because you were sleeping,” She says, taking a sip if Chardonnay.”I was taking a nap, Mom. It wasn’t intended to be some kind of Disney fairy-tale hundred-year snooze.” ― Alyson Noel, Art Geeks and Prom Queens
- “The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son.” ― Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock
- “Don’t overact the story of your name. Overact the story of your work.” ― Karl Lagerfield
- “There is a common tendency to turn off one’s imagination at certain points and refuse to contemplate the possibility of having to do certain things and cope with the attendant moral problems. The things simply get done by the social machine, and one can keep one’s clear conscience and one’s moral indignation unsullied.” ― John Fraser, Violence in the Arts
- “One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that’s a chair, that’s a table, and yet at the same time, It’s a miracle, it’s an ecstasy.” ― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
- “Indeed, [Jimmy] Dean believed in Rowlf so completely that he would sometimes genuinely break up when Rowlf delivered one-liners, laughing so hard that he was unable to sing. “I treated Rowlf like he was real, but he WAS real to me,” Dean said, “and I think that’s one of the reasons he made such an impression on everyone.” ― Brian Jay Jones, Jim Henson: The Biography
- “Music is art, and art is an integral part of the human experience.” ― Anne Frasier, Hush
- “Art is the overflow of emotion into action.” ― Brian Raif
- “When you do not know what you are doing and what you are doing is the best — that is inspiration.” ― Robert Bresson
- “Just as music is noise that makes sense, a painting is colour that makes sense, so a story is life that makes sense.” ― Yann Martel, Beatrice and Virgil
- “When someone complains that you haven’t created what they wanted, that’s really not your problem. It is up to them to find the means and ideas to create what they think the world is missing. Sometimes, if you want it, then it’s up to you to make it. Build it and they may not come, but at least you’ve built something.” ― Robin Ince, I’m a Joke and So Are You: Reflections on Humour and Humanity
- “Film as dream, film as music. No art passes our conscience in the way film does, and goes directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls.” ― Ingmar Bergman
- “Kids always find a way to have fun! This is the best art for the adults to learn from the kids!” ― Mehmet Murat ildan
- Most people die before they are fully born. Creativeness means to be born before one dies. Erich Fromm
- “But, as in sculpture, they were fond of dispensing as much as possible with dress, for the sake of exhibiting the more essential beauty of the figure; on the stage they would endeavour, from an opposite principle, to clothe as much as they could well do, both from a regard to decency, and because the actual forms of the body would not correspond sufficiently with the beauty of the countenance. They would also exhibit their divinities, which in sculpture we always observe either entirely naked, or only half covered, in a complete dress.” ― August Wilhelm Schlegel, Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature
- “What a strange creature man is! He does not believe in God, but he does believe that if the bridge of his nose itches he is surely going to die; he disdains to read the creation of a poet, as clear as day and imbued with harmony and the lofty wisdom of simplicity, yet he pounces eagerly on a book in which some know-all has churned everything up, spun a lot of nonsense, bent and twisted nature inside out. He thinks this book is marvelous and he shouts from the rooftops: ‘This is it, these are the true facts of the mysteries of the heart!” ― Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls
- “Any great art work … 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
- “Art dulls the terror of the void better than anything else.” ― Charles Baudelaire, Paris Spleen and Wine and Hashish
- “Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist” ― René Magritte
- “Beautiful storms dressed in women’s clothing.” ― Jenim Dibie, The Calligraphy of God
- “We may not stay quick, If we are weak or sage, but a lot can squeak As we start to age.” ― Ana Claudia Antunes, The Tao of Physical and Spiritual