Top 55 Great Art Quotes

Music is an emotional experience, and that is what imprints itself on the soul. And I think for me, any great art is art which communicates human emotion.

The interpretation of dreams is a great art.

No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.

The great art of the past became great because it started to go out of the perimeters that defined art and defined new territories.

Under Thatcher, who ruled us with an iron rod, great art was made. Amazing designers and musicians. Acid house was born. Very colourful and progressive.

Universal human characteristics are a good base for great art.

Creative output, you know, is just pain. I’m going to be cliche for a minute and say that great art comes from pain.

I don’t like how women’s bodies are Page 3 news. I just don’t think that’s big news. Women’s bodies are women’s bodies, and that’s that. And I love to see beautiful – the female form in great art and great photography.

Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

It’s hard to make great art when you’ve got too much pressure.

Movies are so rarely great art that if we cannot appreciate great trash we have very little reason to be interested in them.

Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!

Not all artists have a responsibility to be socially or politically aware, but they do have a responsibility to make great art. They have to find some truth and put that in their music.

Of all the seasons, winter is the most conducive to the great art of dormancy. This art requires an appreciation of semi-consciousness: the beautiful and necessary prelude to sleep – a special pleasure in itself that is all too often neglected, under-valued or looked down upon.

I honestly think that’s one of the greatest motivators of art – the fear of not making great art.

Great art is as irrational as great music. It is mad with its own loveliness.

Great art is the expression of a solution of the conflict between the demands of the world without and that within.

A proof of really great art is that it is generally true – it seldom falls into the misapprehensions to which minor art is liable.

The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain.

I think that all great art never strives to answer any questions; it just asks the appropriate ones at the appropriate time.

I grew up overseas in Indonesia, and my school had a great art, music, and theatre program.

Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.

Well, we have certainly produced great art before we did this. In my view, there are any number of areas of government which tax money should not be spent.

It should be quite clear that it is possible for unpleasant people who are small in various ways other than in their artistic genius to produce great art. Art and morality have no necessary connection.

I had two great art teachers at school, but even they tried to tell me it was too hard a world. But that made being an artist even more attractive.

It is no great art to say something briefly when, like Tacitus, one has something to say; when one has nothing to say, however, and none the less writes a whole book and makes truth into a liar – that I call an achievement.

I do not feel any artist can produce great art without putting great personality into it. It is always a piece of you that goes on the screen or the canvass.

Great art would have ‘head’: it would have interesting intellectual ideas and concepts. It would have ‘heart’ in that it would have passion and heart and soul. And it would have ‘hand’ in that it would be greatly crafted.

There’s an audience for all kinds of great art.

I’m lucky enough and wealthy enough to be able to buy photographs and buy art that inspires me from day to day. I don’t want a Picasso on my wall; it’s great art, but it’s dead art to me. I’d rather have a photograph by someone I’ve never heard of that really inspires me.

To be a good artist, you need to be sensitive to the world around you, you need to be curious, you need to listen, you need to be willing to learn from people. A lot of great art is about people being moved by something or seeing something that stops them dead.

The more people who look at great art, the better for our culture.

The philosophy behind Patreon is that all the great art we have known has been made because of patronage.

The great art of films does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.

You don’t have to have a great art idea – just get to work and something will happen. So that’s pretty much my modus operandi and pretty much my principal position, such as it is.

To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.

The mere existence of ‘Buffy’ proves the declinists wrong about one thing: Hollywood commercialism can produce great art. Complex and evolving characters. Playful language. Joy and sorrow, pathos and elation. Episodes that dare to be different – to tell stories in silence or in song. Big themes and terrible choices.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

Writing for TV or films isn’t great art. You have to have a common denominator. It’s up to the composer to make that common denominator memorable.

The plan was just to make great art, and working with Donald Glover, who is such a renaissance man, we’ve been working together for ten years, and he is always pushing the envelope in a way – like, whenever we work together, I have no idea what it is going to turn out to be.

Once people have seen four or five Henry Moores, they will have a sense of great art.

When I have a creative block, I take walks. I like to see what shapes stick out – so many legs rushing by at once, it can seem abstract. I don’t need to see great art to get stirred up. Music does that for me more easily.

My errors will point to thinking men the various roads, and will teach them the great art of treading on the brink of the precipice without falling into it.

I think great art poses questions and doesn’t necessarily give answers and solutions – that’s not what I’m trying to do.

The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

I grew up listening to country music. I got into traditional stuff later, but I listened to the commercial stuff of the ’90s, especially the women who were so strong, like Mary Chapin Carpenter and Kathy Mattea. It’s a great art form.

Music, for me, is the most sacred of the arts. I say that because music communicates in a way that no other art form can. All great art has a spirit that we recognize and appreciate, but music goes directly to your heart.

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult chapters in the great art of living.

We figured the audience would want good stories, great art, wonderful characters, people you could fall in love with that we would immediately put through hell.

I don’t think there’s any formula for what makes great art.

We do not judge great art. It judges us.

My goal has always been to just be a person who makes great art.

To know how to suggest is the great art of teaching. To attain it we must be able to guess what will interest; we must learn to read the childish soul as we might a piece of music. Then, by simply changing the key, we keep up the attraction and vary the song.

I think that in Sweden and a lot of European countries, there’s this whole mythology of the wounded artist: that you can’t really do any great art unless you’re suffering.