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Browse all 10,075 quotes or apply filters in different categories to narrow your search.
Leo Tolstoy2 quotes
Art is a human activity having for its purpose the transmission to others of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen. — Leo Tolstoy · 1897Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity. — Leo Tolstoy · 1897Alexander Pope1 quote
To wake the soul by tender strokes of art,
To raise the genius, and to mend the heart;
To make mankind, in conscious virtue bold,
Live o'er each scene, and be what they behold:
For this the tragic Muse first trod the stage. — Alexander Pope · 1713Claes Oldenburg1 quote
I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street. — Claes Oldenburg · 1961Dorothea Tanning1 quote
Art has always been the raft on to which we climb to save our sanity. — Dorothea Tanning · 2002Edward Hopper1 quote
If you could say it in words, there'd be no reason to paint. — Edward Hopper · 1956Edward Steichen1 quote
The mission of photography is to explain man to man and each man to himself. — Edward Steichen · 1972Eugene Delacroix1 quote
The first virtue of a painting is to be a feast for the eyes. — Eugene Delacroix · 1863Georges Braque1 quote
Art is meant to disturb, science reassures. — Georges Braque · 1952Glenn Gould1 quote
The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder. — Glenn Gould · 1982Gustave Flaubert1 quote
Human life is a sad show, undoubtedly: ugly, heavy and complex. Art has no other end, for people of feeling, than to conjure away the burden and bitterness. — Gustave Flaubert · 1864Henri Matisse1 quote
I want anyone tired, worn down, driven to the limits of endurance, to find calm and repose in my painting. — Henri Matisse · 1913Hermann Hesse1 quote
When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something that lasts longer than we do. — Hermann Hesse · 1930John Dennis1 quote
The great design of art is to restore the decays that happened to human nature by the fall, by restoring order. — John Dennis · 1704Pablo Picasso1 quote
Painting is not done to decorate apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy. — Pablo Picasso · 1945Samuel Beckett1 quote
To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now. — Samuel Beckett · 1930Thomas Merton1 quote
Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time. — Thomas Merton · 1955Victor Cousin1 quote
We must have religion for religion's sake, morality for morality's sake, as with art for art's sake... The beautiful cannot be the way to what is useful, or to what is good, or to what is holy; it leads only to itself. — Victor Cousin · 1818W.H. Auden1 quote
Though the great artists of the past could not change the course of history, it is only through their work that we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible. — W.H. Auden · 1967Will Barnet1 quote
Throughout the ages, man has conquered tragedy with his ability to create works of art. — Will Barnet · 1964Zhang Huan1 quote
I want to make work so people can be moved by a sense of the possible. — Zhang Huan · 2000