Quotes about Art

Never judge a work of art by its defects.

I've never felt a desire (and I don't believe I ever shall) to bring the public to my work... a certain popularity seems to me the least desirable of things.

The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.

Every single work of art is the fulfillment of a prophecy; for every work of art is the conversion of an idea into an image.

Every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.

Devotion is like the candle which Michael Angelo used to take in his pasteboard cap, so as not to throw his shadow upon the work in which he was engaged.

Perfectionism is the enemy of art. Since art is essentially divine play, not dogged work, it often happens that as one becomes more professionally driven one also becomes less capriciously playful.

Dancers have more bones than most people and on the days when you work hard you are sure that you have somehow accumulated more bones than you started with.

...a genuine work of art, can never be false, nor can it be discredited through the lapse of time, for it does not present an opinion but the thing itself.

Whatever I'm writing comes organically out of my life.

Propaganda is when a viewpoint is promoted regardless of truth. Art is when truth is rendered regardless of agenda.

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. The mind that responds to the intellectual and spiritual values that lie hidden in a poem, a painting, or a piece of music, discovers a spiritual vitality that lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.