150 Classical Art Quotes

Following is our list of classical art quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about ancient art.

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Famous Classical Art Quotes

Creating something that is universally beautiful. That is art. — Shu Uemura

Art cannot be modern. Art is primordially eternal. — Egon Schiele

Art is the signature of civilizations. — Beverly Sills

Western art is built on the biographical passion of one artist for another. — Jim Dine

Fine art is knowledge made visible. — Gustave Courbet

Art in its highest form is art that serves and instructs society and human development. — Harry Belafonte

All art is an imitation of nature. — Seneca The Elder

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. - Michelangelo

The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection. — Michelangelo

Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed. — William Blake

A picture is a work of art, not because it is 'modern,' nor because it is 'ancient,' but because it is a sincere expression of human feeling. — John F. Carlson

Real art is one of the most powerful forces in the rise of mankind, and he who renders it accessible to as many people as possible is a benefactor of humanity. — Zoltan Kodaly

Great art picks up where nature ends. - Marc Chagall

Great art picks up where nature ends. — Marc Chagall

All art is but imitation of nature. — Seneca

Sometimes art seems to be something very sublime, and, as you say, something sacred. — Vincent Van Gogh

True art awakens the Extraordinary Ovation — Hafez

Short Classical Art Quotes

  • Simplicity is the greatest adornment of art. — Albrecht Durer
  • Art is the triumph over chaos. — John Cheever
  • A work of art is the trace of a magnificent struggle. — Grace Hartigan
  • The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance. — Aristotle
  • The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity. — Mae Jemison
  • Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature. — Marcus Tullius Cicero
  • Painting and sculpture help other people to see what a wonderful world we live in. — Henry Moore
  • Art is the proper task of life. — Friedrich Nietzsche
  • Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame. — G. K. Chesterton
  • All great works of art are trophies of victorious struggle. — Julius Meier-Graefe

Classical Art Image Quotes

Classical art quote You're a work of art. Not everyone will understand you, but the ones who do, will never forget about
You're a work of art. Not everyone will understand you, but the ones who do, will never forget about you.

What An Art Quotes

I believe that every human being should try to do good for someone else. There are so many different ways to do it. My art can be an instrument for helping people... What a good feeling - that I can do that with my art. — Romero Britto

One of the things my career as an artist might say to young artists is: The things that are close to you are the things you can photograph the best. And unless you photograph what you love, you are not going to make good art. — Sally Mann

That is what art is at the end of the day: It's an escapism that we all crave. - Lauren Jauregui

That is what art is at the end of the day: It's an escapism that we all crave. — Lauren Jauregui

Classical art quote The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.
The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.

The act of creation is an attempt to enter a mysterious realm. A longing to transcend. What we create allows us to share glimpses of an inner landscape, one that is beyond our understanding. Art is our portal to the unseen world. — Rick Rubin

Only Art is Eternal Wisdom; what is not Art soon perishes. Art is the unconscious love of all things. ‘Learning’ will cease and Reality will become known when it comes to pass that every human being is an Artist. — Austin Osman Spare

Computer programming is an art, because it applies accumulated knowledge to the world, because it requires skill and ingenuity, and especially because it produces objects of beauty. A programmer who subconsciously views himself as an artist will enjoy what he does and will do it better. — Donald Knuth

Classical art quote Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.
Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work of art.

By some ardent enthusiasts Chess has been elevated into a science or an art. It is neither; but its principal characteristic seems to be - what human nature mostly delights in - a fight. — Emanuel Lasker

Black and white is a very minimalist art form and unlike color photographs does not pretend to mimic the world in a manner similar to the way the human eye might perceive... Black and white is essentially an abstract way to interpret and transform what one might refer to as reality. — Roger Ballen

Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. — Aristotle

It's not about how you are when things go well, what defines you is how you are when you fail from an obstacle. — Georges St-Pierre

Ancient Art Quotes

I have a high art, I hurt with cruelty those who would damage me. - Archilochus

I have a high art, I hurt with cruelty those who would damage me. — Archilochus

In Old Europe and Ancient Crete, women were respected for their roles in the discovery of agriculture and for inventing the arts of weaving and pottery making. — Carol P. Christ

Atlantis was a highly evolved civilization where the sciences and arts were far more advanced than one might guess. Atlantis was technologically advanced in genetic engineering, computer science, inter-dimensional physics, and artistically developed with electronic music and crystal art forms. — Frederick Lenz

Classical art quote There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.

Unfortunately, half the boats were lost in a great storm at sea, and many members of the six boats that did make it to their destinations safely, were later killed by the very native people to whom they sought to transmit their knowledge of the Atlantean sciences, arts and metaphysics. — Frederick Lenz

The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years. — Jerry Saltz

The old Atlantean sciences from the tribe of enlightenment, of which there are only a few remnants and chards left in this world, were medicine, law, computers, and the performing arts. — Frederick Lenz

Rae Chorze Fwaz was a mystery school. A mystery school is an occult order comprised of people who study meditation, enlightenment and psychic and occult arts. — Frederick Lenz

All this angst, all this stuff we all feel, is just tied to making art. It's so ancient. — Paul Beatty

When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you. — Lao Tzu

[On the ancient Venus figurines:] If the central religious figure was a woman giving birth and not, as in our time, a man dying on a cross, it would not be unreasonable to infer that life and the love of life - rather than death and the fear of death - were dominant in society as well as art. — Riane Eisler

Greek Art Quotes

Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, yet you're my favorite work of art. Is your figure less than Greek, is your mouth a little weak? When you open it to speak, are you smart? — Chet Baker

There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The future science of government should be called 'la cybernétique' (1843) Coining the French word to mean 'the art of governing,' from the Greek (Kybernetes = navigator or steersman), subsequently adopted as cybernetics by Norbert Weiner for the field of control and communication theory. — Andre-Marie Ampere

Botany is the art of insulting flowers in Greek and Latin. — Alphonse Karr

The Dance of the Future will have to become again a high religious art as it was with the Greeks. For art which is not religious is not art, it is mere merchandise — Isadora Duncan

The oldest theory of art belongs to the Greeks, who regarded art as an imitation (mimesis) of reality. The strength of that theory is that it explains the way in which art takes its materials from real life. — Leland Ryken

Prehistoric art came to move me much more than Greek art. Greek art has beautiful women and handsome men, but I don't care. — Pierre Soulages

I merely say that all reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek, mathematics, astronomy, Benedetto Croce, or The Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living. — Raymond Chandler

All that we call ideal in Greek or any other art, because to us it is false and visionary, was, to the makers of it, true and existent. — John Ruskin

I would like my work to be recognized as being in the classical tradition (Coptic, Egyptian, Greek, Chinese), as representing the Ideal in the mind. Classical art cannot possibly be eclectic. One must see the ideal in one's own mind. It is like a memory - an awareness -of perfection. — Agnes Martin

Classical Literature Quotes

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name. — George Saintsbury

If you make the choice of reading classic literature every day for a year, rather than reading the news, by the end of that time period you’ll have a more honed sensitivity for recognizing greatness from the books than from the media. — Rick Rubin

I had a lot of classical influences. I had classical music and opera and literature, but I also liked sleaze. And putting it together, sleaze and glamour, it just made sense to me. — Rick Owens

The classic literature is always modern. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Writing detective stories is about writing light literature, for entertainment. It isn't primarily a question of writing propaganda or classical literature. — Steig Larsson

I love the Russian classics very much, the Russian classical literature. But I also read modern literature. As far as Russian literature is concerned, I am very fond of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and I also enjoy reading Gogol very much. — Vladimir Putin

Chess is my profession. I am my own boss; I am free. I like literature and music, classical especially. I am in fact quite normal; I have a Bohemian profession without being myself a Bohemian. I am neither a conformist nor a great revolutionary. — Bent Larsen

Classic literature is still something that hangs in the air like a song. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

The classics are only primitive literature. They belong to the same class as primitive machinery and primitive music and primitive medicine. — Stephen Leacock

Most of what we call the classics of world literature suggest artifacts in a wax museum. We have to hire and pay professors to get them read and talked about. — Edward Abbey

Classical Education Quotes

What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age. — Sylvia Plath

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment. — George Orwell

Classical education has deformed everything, and has imposed upon us as geniuses men of correct, facile talent, who follow the beaten track. — Emile Zola

Pyramid-building, earthquakes, even wars may serve to increase wealth, if the education of our statesmen on the principles of the classical economics stands in the way of anything better. — John Maynard Keynes

Fate of empires depends on the education of youth — Aristotle

It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment. — Arthur Conan Doyle

I owe the little formal education I got to my drama teacher, Mr. Pickett, who got us to read Shakespeare, Moliere, and other classics. — Dennis Quaid

Anyone who has passed though the regular gradations of a classical education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having had a very narrow escape. — William Hazlitt

Teaching is the last refuge of feeble minds with a classical education. — Aldous Huxley

If income was directly proportional to technical proficiency and education, classical and jazz musicians would be some of the most affluent people in the world. — Robert Emerson Coleman

Classical Music Quotes

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words. - Victor Hugo

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words. — Victor Hugo

What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion, and understated erotica that popular music, even with all of its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch? — Lara St. John

At the age when Bengali youth almost inevitably writes poetry, I was listening to European classical music. — Satyajit Ray

One of the problems that we face through the media attention that these artists receive is that there has been an awful lot of talk about opera and classical music being elite and being for an elitist group. — Lesley Garrett

A painter paints pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. — Leopold Stokowski

To sing is to pray twice. — Saint Augustine

Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

With the Stray Cats at least, we really took the music somewhere else. First, we wrote our own songs. That's a real weak point in modern classics if you do rockabilly or blues. — Brian Setzer

I still the love classic period, but also the baroque period, and even 17th-Century music such as the music of Monteverdi. He's one of the greatest opera composers. He was the one who really started the opera. — Cecilia Bartoli

I did not care for Wagner. My tastes are more classical. Der Fuhrer had no musical taste and liked Wagner because of the bombastic Teutonic glories. — Hans Frank

Art History Quotes

After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture. — Jeffrey Deitch

Every age has the Stonehenge it deserves -- or desires. — Jacquetta Hawkes

Life is a loom, weaving illusion. — Vachel Lindsay

How do you make any sense of history, art or literature without knowing the stories and iconography of your own culture and all the world's main religions? — Polly Toynbee

I learned more from my mother than from all the art historians and curators who have informed me about technical aspects of art history and art appreciation over the years. — David Rockefeller

To me history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is. — David McCullough

Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world. — Dave Barry

Beauty is a form of genius -- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. — Oscar Wilde

The study of History is the beginning of wisdom. — Jean Bodin

That's what hell must be like, small chat to the babbling of Lethe about the good old days when we wished we were dead. — Samuel Beckett

Religious Art Quotes

I do believe that one way to bring cultures together, to develop trust between people and countries and religions, is through education. And through music and art and basketball and activities and joys that people share worldwide, regardless of ethnic background or religious orientation. — Steve Kerr

Nearly everything that defines much of our daily experiences is consummatory in nature. Yes, we consume products and services. But we also consume life experiences, religious narratives, art, literature, and ideas. — Gad Saad

God does not ask for 'religious' art or 'Catholic' art. The art he wants for himself is Art, with all its teeth — Jacques Maritain

The passion for art is, as for believers, very religious. It unites people, its message is of common humanity. Art has become my religion - others pray in church. It's a banality, but you don't possess art, it possesses you. It's like falling in love. — Francois Pinault

Art is viable when it finds elements in the surrounding environment. Our ancestors drew their subject matter from the religious attitudes which weighed on their souls. We must now learn to draw inspiration from the tangible miracles around us. — Umberto Boccioni

Art and Religion are, then, two roads by which men escape from circumstance to ecstasy. Between aesthetic and religious rapture there is a family alliance. Art and Religion are means to similar states of mind. — Clive Bell

I really do think that art can save you in some sense. It's the last meaning, unless you're religious-and I'm not religious. It's the only secular vehicle for transcendence we have. It's an immediate self-validating experience. It lifts you beyond your mortal clay. — Sam Savage

Lucky people develop a relationship with a certain kind of art that becomes spiritual, almost religious, and doesn’t mean, you know, church stuff, but it means you’re just never the same. — David Foster Wallace

True art is made noble and religious by the mind producing it. — Michelangelo

In my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it. — Albert Einstein

People Writing About Classical Art

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Egon Schiele

Egon Schiele
quotes on life, love and death

16 209
Read quotes by Beverly Sills

Beverly Sills
quotes on love, friendship and life

38 457
Read quotes by Jim Dine

Jim Dine
quotes on art, culture and life

13 192
Read quotes by Gustave Courbet

Gustave Courbet
quotes on love, art and life

31 134
Read quotes by Harry Belafonte

Harry Belafonte
quotes on racism

74 899
Read quotes by Seneca The Elder

Seneca The Elder
quotes on death, education and leadership

246 2313

More Classical Art Quotes

A Classical style... is the syllogism of art, the only legitimate process from one world to another. Classicism is not the manner of any fixed age or of any fixed country; it is a constant state of the artistic mind. It is a temper of security and satisfaction and patience. — James Joyce

What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant and of these surprising points of view that appear for a brief moment and never return; those are what make photography an art. — Raoul Hausmann

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art. — Russell Banks

Much as I cared for Joseph Kennedy, he was a classic example of that person in the arts with lots of brains and drive but little taste or talent. — Gloria Swanson

I went to the Performing Arts School and studied classical ballet. That attitude is something that's put into your head. You are never thin enough. — Carmen Electra

Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there. — Bruce Lee

Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. — Mark Twain

If classical music is the state of the art, then the arts are in a sad state. — Frank Zappa

I've worked with some great orchestras and amazing classical musicians, but I don't like the conceptualization of classical music as an elitist form of art. — Serj Tankian

A Haydn symphony had a meaning for the social group that listened to it. A Mahler symphony had a meaning for the man who composed it. Here is the difference between the classical and romantic attitudes to art. — Anthony Burgess

Romanticism was more than merely an alternative to a sterile classicism; romanticism made possible, especially in art, a great expansion of the human consciousness. — Edward Abbey

The objective of the Classical Art of Riding is to train the horse not only to be brilliant in the movements and the exercises of the High School but also to be quiet, supple and obedient and by his smooth movements to make riding a true pleasure — Alois Podhajsky

Music is the art which is most nigh to tears and memories. — Oscar Wilde

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

Classical art stands for form; romantic art for content. — Robin G. Collingwood

All these poses of classical torture ruined my mind like a snake in the orchard. I did go from wanting to be someone, now I'm drunk and wearing flip-flops on Fifth Avenue. — Rufus Wainwright

According to the classic liberal-arts ideal, learning promises liberation, but it is not liberation from demanding moral ideals and social norms, or liberation to act on our desires-it is, rather, liberation from slavery to those desires, from slavery to self. — Robert P. George

We are at home here. Alienation is unnecessary. Contact with reality at a deep level is part of the Christian's life. He enters into reality, rather than escaping from it. The flight from reality is a mark of Eastern and classical mysticism, not of Christianity. — Hans Rookmaaker

Suddenly I've got an overwhelming desire to surround myself with the aura of classical and Romantic art. — Sylvester Stallone

I will never forget the pleasure and instruction I derived from working with a true master of his art, such as Edward G. Robinson was - and is. Surely his record for versatility, studied characterization - ranging from modern colloquial to the classics - and artistic integrity is unsurpassed. — Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.

They tell me Wagner's music is better than it sounds. — Edgar Wilson Nye

The creator of the new composition in the arts is an outlaw until he is a classic. — Gertrude Stein

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance. — Max Eastman

The fact is, the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. — Oscar Wilde

Another classical music teacher from Performing Arts that I've stayed in contact with is Jonathan Strasser. — Jon Gordon

Technology and the Internet have created a new set of relationships. It's changed the social fabric of promotion: advertising, dating. Part of art world judgment, part of it, is based on people's statistics; their measure of financial value: of likes, of popularity. Data and technology are invading the traditional and classic set of criteria. — Steve Miller

Part of my mission is simply that: to bring the world of the arts, particularly classical music, closer to people so they don't feel that it is something remote that they have to specially prepare themselves for, or dress up for. — Michael Tilson Thomas

when dancing is right, the movement possesss a logic common to us all, an inevitability that takes it beyond the personal and egocentric and makes of it classical art. — Twyla Tharp

What passion cannot music raise and quell! — John Dryden

A love of classical music is only partially a natural response to hearing the works performed, it also must come about by a decision to listen carefully, to pay close attention, a decision inevitably motivated by the cultural and social prestige of the art. — Charles Rosen

We want to answer this classical question, who am I? So I think that most of our works are for art, or whatever we do, including science or religion, tried to answer that question. — Paulo Coelho

All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part. — Henry Moore

Although in society in general, the idea of an Irish composer of 'classical music', or whatever you want to call it, is still a strange item, generally speaking. Even in the arts, among our fellow creative artists in other disciplines, you still feel slightly out of it. — John Kinsella

Bob Dylan's one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse. — Allen Ginsberg

When I left the theater… I was thinking that I’d seen a classic of American dance. It confers a mythic dimension on ordinary aspects of our daily lives – it’s unfaked folk art. The dancers, crashing wave upon wave into those falls, have a happy insane spirit that recalls a unique moment in American life – the time we did the school play or we were ready to drown at a swimming meet. The last time most of us were happy in that way. — Arlene Croce

Being a former dancer, classical dancer, it informed me as a human being just in terms of the grace I guess. Ballet is a very graceful form of art. You also become very aware of your body and your mind and your body is working in conjunction. That kind of helps you in acting as well. It's not only using your mind, it's like making your mind communicate this character into your body so that you can bring it to life and physicalize it. — Zoe Saldana

There are so many different ways to talk and think about art. We just spoke about when attitude becomes form. But when I was a kid, I had these two art teachers, a couple, who were continuing a line of very classical, atelier art training, and they instilled in me a sensitivity to all the classical verities of line, shape, color, texture, and composition, which is only engaging if you're making two-dimensional objects. — David Salle

I went back to my mother's house recently and I saw some of my earlier works as a 15-year-old art student. And a lot of them were reiterations of classic works. — Kehinde Wiley

Read the classics one hour every day, drunk or sober. Reading the classics gives one a feeling of confidence. It familiarizes one with the vagaries of life. It shows one that there are really no new plots. — Richard Haynes

The art of writing is mysterious; the opinions we hold are ephemeral , and I prefer the Platonic idea of the Muse to that of Poe, who reasoned, or feigned to reason, that the writing of a poem is an act of the intelligence. It never fails to amaze me that the classics hold a romantic theory of poetry, and a romantic poet a classical theory. — Jorge Luis Borges

I understand that in people's eyes, classical music is kind of a lost and dying art, but in my eyes, it's like, "Oh, the musical language, which has been, in the past, only available to a scarce few at the top of the tower, is now wide open." Now people's ears are becoming more amenable to fake strings - I think this is great! — Owen Pallett

Being from a classical environment, I've always been provoked by classical musicians thinking that classical music is so much greater art than pop. I've always been annoyed by that. — Matias Tellez

[Phil Wood] knew about wine. He knew about food. He knew about art. He knew about classical music. He was interested in things. — Jon Gordon

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