We may not know much about art, but we know what we like.
We also know that art is considered the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.
Whatever that means.
But surely, it is not for the likes of us to decide what is and isn't art. If it is created by humankind, it is - by the above definition - art. Here, then, are 31 profound, moving, and beautiful works of human creativity that we have chosen especially for our discerning readers...
We also know that art is considered the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.
Whatever that means.
But surely, it is not for the likes of us to decide what is and isn't art. If it is created by humankind, it is - by the above definition - art. Here, then, are 31 profound, moving, and beautiful works of human creativity that we have chosen especially for our discerning readers...
31. "The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance." - Aristotle
30. "The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls." - Pablo Picasso
29. "When I think of art I think of beauty. Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye it is in the mind. In our minds there is awareness of perfection." - Agnes Martin
28. "The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection." - Michelangeo
27. "Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known." - Oscar Wilde
26. "Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures." - Henry Ward Beecher
25. "I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way - things I had no words for." - Georgia O'Keefe
24. "A picture is a poem without words." - Horace
23. "The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude." Friedrich Nietzsche
22. "A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual." Vladimir Nabokov
21. "All art is autobiographical. The pearl is the oyster's autobiography." - Federico Fellini
20. "A man paints with his brains and not with his hands." - Michelangelo
19. "Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth." - Theodor Adorno
18. "An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have." - Andy Warhol
17. "The artist produces for the liberation of his soul. It is his nature to create as it is the nature of water to run down the hill." - W.Somerset Maughan
16. "Art evokes the mystery without which the world would not exist." - Rene Magritte
15. "Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable." - George Bernard Shaw
14. "Every good painter paints what he is." - Jackson Pollock
13. "Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings." - Agnes Martin
12. "Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods." - Iris Murdoch
11. "Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better." - Andre Gide
10. "An artist never really finishes his work, he merely abandons it." - Paul Valery
9. "I don't paint things. I only paint the difference between things." - Henri Matisse
8. "Art is nature speeded up and God slowed down." - Malcolm de Chazal
7. "Great art is an instant arrested in eternity." - James Huneker
6. "Art does not reproduce what we see; rather, it makes us see." - Paul Klee
5. "Real artists take the misery and sadness of life and translate it into art." - Josh Peck
4. "It is the addition of strangeness to beauty that constitutes the romantic character in art." - Walter Hagen
3. "If my art has nothing to do with people's pain and sorrow, what is 'art' for?" - Ai Weiwei
2. "Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable." - Charles Baudelaire
1. "We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth, at least the truth that is given to us to understand." - Pablo Picasso
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