Art Quotes

“It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art.”

-- Henry Louis Gates

“When hospitality becomes an art it loses its very soul.”

-- Max Beerbohm

“Yes, 85 percent of the art you see isn't any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.”

-- Jerry Saltz

“When art wins, everyone wins.”

-- Jerry Saltz

“Deals are my art form. Other people paint beautifully on canvas or write wonderful poetry. I like making deals, preferably big deals. That's how I get my kicks.”

-- Edward Koch

“Poetry is the art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing.”

-- Edmund Burke

“Great art picks up where nature ends.”

-- Marc Chagall

“Life is the art of being well deceived and in order that the deception may succeed it must be habitual and uninterrupted.”

-- William Hazlitt

“It's clever, but is it Art?”

-- Rudyard Kipling

“I say that democracy can never prove itself beyond cavil, until it founds and luxuriantly grows its own forms of art, poems, schools, theology, displacing all that exists, or that has been produced anywhere in the past, under opposite influences.”

-- Walt Whitman