Art Quotes  
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      Why do we call them Fine Arts?

“Why do we call them Fine Arts?” In French and Spanish, they are Beautiful Arts - Les Beaux Arts, las Bellas artes. According to the New York Times, they are the “Living Arts”. The “fine” in Fine Arts comes from the Latin ‘finis’, meaning the end, the utmost limit, or the highest point and, by metaphoric extensions, consummate, accomplished, complete.

Lois Zamora, Dean, University of Houston
College of Humanities, Fine Arts, and Communication

Practice what you know, and it will help to make clear what you don’t yet understand.
Rembrant van Rijn

“... the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.”           Marcel Duchamp

“Art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass.” Walter Pater, ‘The Renaissance’

“Everywhere and always uglyness has its beautif aspects; it is thrilling to discover them where nobody else noticed.” Henri Toulouse-Lautrec

“Each art exists because the ideas special to it cannot be transmitted otherwise….”
Vernon Blake

... the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act. This becomes even more obvious when posterity gives its final verdict and sometimes rehabilitates forgotten artists.           Marcel Duchamp

Art is the lie that makes us realize the truth. Pablo Picasso

A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry.           G.B. Shaw

Art is a form of catharsis
-Dorothy Parker

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.
-Paul Gauguin

Life beats down and crushes the soul and art reminds you that you have one. --      Stella Adler

I had always loved beautiful and artistic things, though before leaving America I had had a very little chance of seeing any. --Emma Albani

O, thou art fairer than the evening air.
-Christopher Marlowe

All art is a revolt against man's fate.
--André Malraux

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Nature is a revelation of God; Art a revelation of man.
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda, it is a form of truth. --John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Art is a form of catharsis.
--Dorothy Parker

The more minimal the art, the more maximum the explanation. --Hilton Kramer

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in. --Amy Lowell

As long as art is the beauty parlor of civilization, neither art nor civilization is secure.
--John Dewey

If my husband would ever meet a woman on the street who looked like the women in his paintings, he would fall over in a dead faint. --Mrs. Pablo Picasso

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

Fashion is a potency in art, making it hard to judge between the temporary and the lasting. --E. C. Stedman

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

Art is the stored honey of the human soul, gathered on wings of misery and travail. --Theodore Dreiser

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist,and the less the artist does the better. --André Gide

The people who make art their business are mostly imposters. --Pablo Picasso

Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned.
--William Butler Yeats

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere. --Gilbert K. Chesterton

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him. --John Fitzgerald Kennedy

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness. --George Jean Nathan

The course of Nature is the art of God.
--Edward Young

Art is a jealous mistress, and if a man has a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. --Michelangelo

Art is an effort to create, beside the real world, a more human world. --André Maurois

Science and art belong to the whole world, and before them vanish the barriers of nationality.
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is no such thing as modern art. There is art--and there is advertising. --Albert Sterner

Perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in every work of art. --Ralph Waldo Emerson

The art of a people is a true mirror of their minds.
--Jawaharlal Nehru

Nothing is so poor and melancholy as art that is interested in itself and not in its subject.
--George Santayana

To my mind the old masters are not art; their value is in their scarcity.
--Thomas A. Edison

What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself--life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
--Willa Cather

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?
-Unknown

Learning to draw is really a matter of learning to see - to see correctly – and that means a good deal more than looking with the eye.
-- Kimon Nicoaides