Art History Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Art History

Art History Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Art History quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

Art is the suitcase of history, carrying the essentials. Art is the life buoy of history. Art is seed, art is memory, art is vaccine. — Yann Martel

A shame that these images had become iconic, a tune we were all tired of humming. — Elizabeth Kostova

Megacollectors suppose they can enter art history by spending astronomical amounts. — Jerry Saltz

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with. — Golda Meir

I wrote 'The Painted Word,' about modern art, and was denounced as reactionary. In fact, it is just a history, although a rather loaded one. — Tom Wolfe

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless. — Honore De Balzac

Before the end of Time will be the end of History. Before the end of History will be the end of Art. — Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Gardening is an art form, but it has lost its sense of history. — William Howard Adams

Heraldry is the fusion of fact and fancy, myth and manner, romance and reality. It is an exuberant union of family, art, and history. — Charles Burnett

There have been countless changes in the long history of art. The most significant have been brought about by the genius of a single artist. — Thomas Hoving

The construction of Europe is an art. It is the art of the possible. — Jacques Chirac

There is neither vice nor virtue, there are only circumstances. — Honore De Balzac

I have a long history with Soho: even when I was at art college, I came down to Soho to work in the summer. — Marc Almond

What is desperately needed ... is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides. — Felix Rohatyn

In all history, art has been the food of the poor, — Cameron Jace

Look to the Classics, History, to the Arts, for there is truth. Look away from the systems, the processes, the techniques. — Charles Guggenheim

Art is science in the flesh. — Jean Cocteau

Art has this ability to allow you to connect back through history in the same way that biology does. I'm always looking for source material. — Jeff Koons

I have a strong art-history background. — Eli Roth

No, my degree was history, not the practice of art! I can't draw to save my life you know. — Emma Anderson

The history of art is a sequence of successful transgressions. — Susan Sontag

This is a new phase in history where art, science, business and spirit will join together in the pursuit of true wealth. — James Altucher

We live ruins amid ruins. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

wash the brush, just beats the devil out of it — Bob Ross

History reveals that left-brain people have been creating art for a long time now. — David Luiz

'The Art of the Brick' is an exhibition I've done where I've taken some works of art from art history and replicated them all out of Lego bricks. — Nathan Sawaya

Artists, like the Greek gods, are only revealed to one another. — Oscar Wilde

The history of music is nothing more than the history of art-music or classical music, the music that was commissioned by aristocrats. — Frank Fairfield

What cannot be borne in reality, becomes a source of pleasure when it is transposed into the visual and somatic fiction of the dramatic spectacle. — Claude Calame

A culture is not only the language and the arts of a people. It is all their history, all their hopes for the future. — Robert Payne

The term 'Pre-Raphaelite' is in danger of becoming one of the most misused tags in art history — Christopher Wood

History is conjecture raised to the level of an art. — Marty Rubin

I still feel-kind of temporary about myself. — Arthur Miller

The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that begets heresies. There are no heresies in a dead religion. — Andre Suares

Discontent is the seed of ethics. — Friedrich Nietzsche

I love history. I love art. I like to mix it all together, but in the end it somehow has to all make sense. — Anna Sui

History is as much an art as a science. — Ernest Renan

read the state of the art, the rest of inspiration — Art Opportunities

Love finds lazy writers
And makes example out of them
Nailing them in history — Yarro Rai

For African-American people, I am in the business of inventing a reality that gives a different perspective - on history, on crime, on art, on love. — John Edgar Wideman

Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying. — Lewis Thomas

The Revolution introduced me to art, and in turn, art introduced me to the Revolution! — Albert Einstein

As a matter of history great developments in art have often been remarkably separate from religious motivation and use. — Ruth Benedict

I do believe abstraction is and was meant to embody deep emotion. I believe that's its job, in the history of art. — Sean Scully

I'd love to go off to college to study photography, art history, humanities. — Mia Wasikowska

Everything may happen. — Seneca The Younger

I know where I am going now with art. I have found myself. Yvonne Rust 1994, aged 72. — Theresa Sjoquist

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser. — Adam Gopnik

An artist should know art history. Shock value only lasts so long. — Robert Longo

All good criticism should be judged the way art is. You shouldn't read it the way you read history or science. — Leslie Fiedler

Passion is univeral humanity. Without it religion history art and romance would be useless. — Honore De Balzac

Just as no monkey is as good-looking as the ugliest of humans, no academic is worthier than the worst of the creators — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

The past does not influence me; I influence it. — Willem De Kooning

I'm not as much a history person as an art person, but I mean, you can read history through art. — Kristen Wiig

Of late years (perhaps as a result of our political changes) art has borrowed from history more than ever. — Alfred De Vigny

You're familiar with the tragedies of antiquity, are you? The great homicidal classics? — Tom Stoppard

There are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books. — Charlie Chaplin

"The [London] Times" has published no rumours; it's only reported facts, namely that other, less responsible papers are publishing certain rumours. — Tom Stoppard

All humanity is passion; without passion, religion, history, novels, art would be ineffectual. — Honore De Balzac

Knowledge is addictive. Keep it up. — Theresa Sjoquist

The morality of art is in its very beauty. — Gustave Flaubert

The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves. — Theodor W. Adorno

I'm an unabashed elitist. Everyone needs a good editor, and there is peril in worshiping amateurism and the unedited in science, art, and journalism. — K. Lee Lerner

I just wanted to do something important. — Norman Rockwell

We lost Klimmt, Schiele and Moll — George Pratt

Equilibrium is the profoundest tendency of all human activity. — Jean Piaget

You might argue that the history of contemporary art is a series of avant-garde movements, each new wave outraging the last. — Michael Scott

I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist. — LeRoy Neiman

... what I told them was 'a poem,' a thing made by a maker, a work of art, part history of long ago, part invention. — Ursula K. Le Guin

Don't carry the world around or your history around like a burden. In fact, don't carry it around at all. One step at a time. — Art Hochberg

Death is nothing to us: for that which is dissolved is without sensation; and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us. — Epicurus

When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture. — Chris Marker

The history of modern culture is a history of popular entertainments evolving into art. — Andrew Hoberek

The brain's dense thicket of interrelationships, like those of history or art, does not yield to the reductivist's bright blade. (91) — Thomas Lewis

Is there a Swedish Modernism? — Cecilia Widenheim

Archaeology is not only the hand maid of history, it is also the conservator of art. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

With the plundered people transferring their energies into relaxed and receptive thoughts, degradation and lust for power produced art. — Peter Weiss

Art has this long history, predating even language, of expressing nonverbal information. — Betty Edwards

Beauty is the product of the dominant ideology. (Thus when ideology changes, the ideal body follows.) We can see that in the history of art. — Orlan

We can stand only a certain amount of unhappiness; anything beyond that annihilates us or passes us by, leaving us apathethetic. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I like art history and art criticism. Leo Steinberg has always been my favorite. He's very original, very accurate and acute. — Helen Vendler

If you look at art history, at Goya or Gainsborough, it's always about acknowledging the people of your time who have influence. — Sam Taylor-Johnson

The art of living. Isn't that a funny expression? — Anne Frank

You are what you read. — Nancy Petralia

Captive Greece took captive her savage conquerer and brought the arts to rustic Latium — Horace

I set my sights upon becoming the kind of artist who would make a contribution to art history. — Judy Chicago

History is too slow for our life, for our hearts. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Life is a loom, weaving illusion. — Vachel Lindsay

All our knowledge is symbolic. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

As Michael (Chekhov)'s pupil, I learned more about acting. I learned psychology, history, and the good manners of art - taste. — Marilyn Monroe

Art is History's nostalgia, it prefers a thatched roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church above a bleached village. — Derek Walcott

Art thieves steal more than beautiful objects; they steal memories and identities. They steal history. — Robert K. Wittman

The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art, but to release himself from it in order to replace it with his own history. — Harold Rosenberg

I think I went to Italy initially for the art, architecture, food and history, but I stayed there because of the people in Cortona. — Frances Mayes

History has taught us that the idea of superpower is for a political maniac to design the art of control over other countries. — Nilantha Ilangamuwa

I wanted to go into art history. Acting fell into my lap when a neighbor took pictures of me and showed them to an agent. — Eva Mendes

I went to university in Colorado and studied art history. I did some photography classes there, although it felt really pretentious. — Pamela Hanson

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art ... — Phyllis McGinley

History after all is the true poetry. — Thomas Carlyle