Art Quotes

“It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.”

-- Jerry Saltz

“The idea is, if I can't heal from my art, then how can you heal?”

-- Maynard James Keenan

“The art of life is to know how to enjoy a little and to endure very much.”

-- William Hazlitt

“Once you take yourself too seriously the art will suffer.”

-- Maynard James Keenan

“The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.”

-- E. M. Forster

“Every time a student walks past a really urgent, expressive piece of architecture that belongs to his college, it can help reassure him that he does have that mind, does have that soul.”

-- Louis Kahn

“Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.”

-- Virginia Woolf

“The excellency of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeable evaporate.”

-- John Keats

“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”

-- C. S. Lewis

“Art has a double face, of expression and illusion, just like science has a double face: the reality of error and the phantom of truth.”

-- Publilius Syrus