“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”
Art refuses to sit still or be easily defined, and the best quotes about it do the same. Here you will find painters, sculptors, musicians, and writers wrestling with creativity, beauty, meaning, and the maddening gap between what you imagine and what you manage to make.
“He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.”
“An artist is a dreamer consenting to dream of the actual world.”
“It is the glory and good of Art, That Art remains the one way possible Of speaking truth, to mouths like mine at least.”
“I don't think there's any artist of any value who doesn't doubt what they're doing.”
“Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.”
“'Healing,' Papa would tell me, 'is not a science, but the intuitive art of wooing nature.'”
“In art as in love, instinct is enough.”
“Success and the art of making music are two different things for me.”
“An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.”
“No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.”
“Fashion is only the attempt to realize art in living forms and social intercourse.”
“She had lost the art of conversation but not, unfortunately, the power of speech.”
“A picture is worth a thousand words.”
“Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.”
“The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web.”
“It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.”