Art Quotes

“In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.”

-- Theodore Bikel

“The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.”

-- Arthur Erickson

“In Art, man reveals himself and not his objects.”

-- Rabindranath Tagore

“Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.”

-- Harry S. Truman

“If we could but paint with the hand what we see with the eye.”

-- Honore de Balzac

“Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.”

-- Robert Frost

“Not everybody trusts paintings but people believe photographs.”

-- Ansel Adams

“Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s), I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.”

-- Camille Paglia

“I am trying to make art that relates to the deepest and most mythic concerns of human kind and I believe that, at this moment of history, feminism is humanism.”

-- Judy Chicago

“Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.”

-- Ambrose Bierce