Art Quotes

“When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it's bad art.”

-- Marc Chagall

“Because most people are not sufficiently employed in themselves, they run about loose, hungering for employment, and satisfy themselves in various supererogatory occupations. The easiest of these occupations, which have all to do with making things already made, is the making of people: it is called the art of friendship.”

-- Laura Riding

“When the bright angel dominates, out comes a great work of art, a Michelangelo David or a Beethoven symphony.”

-- Madeleine L'Engle

“The art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can, and keep moving on.”

-- Ulysses S. Grant

“Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.”

-- William Bernbach

“Pictures must not be too picturesque.”

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

“To array a man's will against his sickness is the supreme art of medicine.”

-- Henry Ward Beecher

“Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.”

-- Will Durant

“Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art.”

-- Susan Sontag

“The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.”

-- Benjamin Franklin