Art Direction Quotes & Sayings

The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case. — Chuck Close

I did go to a performing arts school, so that facilitated my creativity, though I ended up going in a more musical direction. — Alycia Debnam Carey

Throughout the Middle Ages, art and architecture had a spiritual mission: to direct man's attention toward God. Churches soared in that direction, and sculpture and paintings pointed the way to paradise. They depicted the sufferings of Christ, the Apostles, martyrs, the Last Judgment, and so on. — Jesse Bryant Wilder

Whether it be in comics, games or film, you can trace the art direction and influences back to some earlier, real-life historic period or artistic movement. — Jim Lee

Literature will save me it's the only certainty i am sure of. — Nikki Rowe

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another. — Joyce Carol Oates

I have a list of ideas that I want to do for my art series, but I'm always trying to figure out what's going to work. Ever since I was in art school, I would read and get ideas. Sometimes the photograph sparks an idea in me, and I continue in that direction. — Jill Greenberg

In what resides the most characteristic Virtue of humanity?
In good works?
Possibly.
In the creation of beautiful objects? Perhaps.
But some would look in a different direction, and find it in detachment. To all such David Hume must be a great saint in the calendar; for no mortal being was ever more completely divested of the trammels of the personal and the particular, none ever practiced with more consummated success the divine art of impartiality — Lytton Strachey

But the long tunnels of art through which I walked in Rome that day had no ragged edges, cowardly colors, or shades of pastel that didn't know what to do with themselves. The wisdom, perfection, and beauty of the colors and forms I passed were more than enough, in their collectivity, to hint at the principles which govern the hereafter, whatever that may be. Indeed, even a detail of one painting can offer solid direction in this regard if one knows how to look — Mark Helprin

Well, suppose we use our brains. We see things solid. Solidities are important to us in nature. In solidities, there are measures that greatly affect us. There are rhythms in the ins and outs of form. Music, the forest and to many the most impressive of arts deals in measures which seem to go in every direction. They combine, they move together, they deflect and they oppose. Music is a structure of highly mathematical measures. According to the selection and relative value of these measures the music is great or small in its effect on us. — Robert Henri

All art, be it writing, painting, film, dance, whatever, is a manipulation of time and space. It's an interpretation and a recreation of the facts, using various artifacts that point us in the direction of our personal truths. — Elisa Lorello

I was quite keen on silviculture, the growing of trees, and that was something I gave a lot of thought to. Maybe I could've gone in that direction. But it just so happened that while I was trying to make up my mind, I enrolled in art school, and there I began to develop my interest in music, parallel with my interest in the visual arts. — Ian Anderson

I made a conscious decision to take my life and career in a different direction. I started working on a play, and also, by attending Burning Man for several years, I was incredibly stimulated by the art there. I increasingly wanted to be a part of it, and focused on what I wanted to say as an artist. — Scott Cohen

So much of a rationalist's skill is below the level of words. It makes for challenging work in trying to convey the Art through blog posts. People will agree with you, but then, in the next sentence, do something subdeliberative that goes in the opposite direction. Not that I'm complaining! A major reason I'm posting here is to observe what my words haven't conveyed. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

anyway and have racks of them in the shop. Sammy would help her by pointing her in the right direction for selling her art. Sammy knew all the commercial art — Jennie Jones

An artist conscientiously moves in a direction which for some good reason he takes, putting one work in front of the other with the hope he'll arrive before death overtakes him. — John Cage

I see no reason why the artistic world can't absolutely merge with Madison Avenue. Pop art is a move in that direction. Why can't we have advertisements with beautiful words and beautiful images? — William S. Burroughs

Galleries are becoming overwhelmed with psychedelic music/art. I like it; it's a good direction, a new blurring of the lines between what you do. — Brian Chippendale

I think a lot of male artists should and probably are thinking in the same ways. The culture has moved in a more democratic, pluralistic direction. You now find a lot of people who are looking outside of the mainstream of the history of art for their mentors. Maybe not heroes, but mentors. — Laura Owens

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

When you and I set out to create anything - art, commerce, science, love - or to advance in the direction of a higher, nobler version of ourselves, we uncork from the universe, ineluctably, an equal and opposite reaction. That reaction is Resistance. Resistance is an active, intelligent, protean, malign force - tireless, relentless, and inextinguishable - whose sole object is to stop us from becoming our best selves and from achieving our higher goals. — Anonymous

I believe in originality, primarily. However, it's important to know what there has been before to aim in that direction. Art history informs us. It informs our mind. I like to look at books, exhibitions, paintings, as a computer, subconsciously taking on information. — Philip Treacy

I'd rather do anything than make commercial art. I didn't go to school for art. Making art has certain advantages for me but they would never be in commercial direction. — Raymond Pettibon

Slowly I discovered the secret of my art. It consists of a meditation on nature, on the expression of a dream which is always inspired by reality. With more involvement and regularity, I learned to push each study in a certain direction. Little by little the notion that painting is a means of expression asserted itself, and that one can express the same thing in several ways. Exactitude is not truth, Delacroix liked to say. — Henri Matisse

In art and science we are now in a delta, at the end of the long flow of progress. In a delta there is no clear direction but there may be many choices. The best we can do is to enjoy the choices that we have and to be genuinely and creatively eclectic. — Robert Bateman

As a senior in high school my counselor recommended that I soften my science and math direction with an art course. Fortunately my high school offered a new course in B&W photography, so I opted for that instead of art, towards which I had an aversion. Composition is something that comes pretty naturally to me and I appreciate ordered chaos: the photo class turned out to be fun. — Peter Menzel

Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time. — Richard Huelsenbeck

Poetry: that can mean an Atemwende, a breathturn. Who knows, perhaps poetry travels this route - also the route of art - for the sake of such a breathturn? Perhaps it will succeed, as the strange, I mean the abyss and the Medusa's head, the abyss and the automatons, seem to lie in one direction - perhaps it will succeed here to differentiate between strange and strange, perhaps it is exactly here that the Medusa's head shrinks, perhaps it is exactly here that the automatons break down - for this single short moment? Perhaps here, with the I - with the estranged I set free here and in this manner - perhaps here a further Other is set free? Perhaps the poem is itself because of this ... and can now, in this art-less, art-free manner, walk its other routes, thus also the routes of art - time and again? Perhaps. — Paul Celan

People don't really have a relationship with great writing or great production or great art direction or great direction. They just sort of admire it. — Steven Moffat

This is the essence of Rembrandt's advice to Van Hoogstraten: the authentic craft develops naturally from one's own experience.
So, it seems reasonable to suggest that the search should not be for the lost secrets, but for one's own practice.
This is in fact easy, you start making things. At first they might not be perfect, but the information here should provide you with a running start. And, if you are cut out for this the learning curve will not be daunting, because you will realize that you are finally headed in the right direction: towards the living craft. — Tad Spurgeon

Poetry is perhaps this: an Atemwende, a turning of our breath. Who knows, perhaps poetry goes its way - the way of art - for the sake of just such a turn? And since the strange, the abyss and Medusa's head, the abyss and the automaton, all seem to lie in the same direction - is it perhaps this turn, this Atemwende, which can sort out the strange from the strange? It is perhaps here, in this one brief moment, that Medusa's head shrivels and the automaton runs down? Perhaps, along with the I, estranged and freed here, in this manner, some other thing is also set free? — Paul Celan

It was a comet. The boy saw the comet and he felt as though his life had meaning. And when it went away, he waited his entire life for it to come back to him. It was more than just a comet because of what it brought to his life: direction, beauty, meaning. There are many who couldn't understand, and sometimes he walked among them. But even in his darkest hours, he knew in his heart that someday it would return to him, and his world would be whole again ... And his belief in God and love and art would be re-awakened in his heart. The boy saw the comet and suddenly his life had meaning. — Lucas Scott

The surpluses will have to be expended somehow, and trust the oligarchs to find a way. Magnificent roads will be built. There will be great achievements in science, and especially in art. When the oligarchs have completely mastered the people, they will have time to spare for other things. They will become worshippers of beauty. They will become art-lovers. And under their direction and generously rewarded, will toil the artists. The result will be great art; for no longer, as up to yesterday, will the artists pander to the bourgeois taste of the middle class. It will be great art, I tell you, and wonder cities will arise that will make tawdry and cheap the cities of old time. And in these cities will the oligarchs dwell and worship beauty — Jack London

I took courses at USC in film editing and art direction and photography when I was still in high school. — Ray Harryhausen

Of course, there are many artists - and many "intellectuals" who write about art - who are still caught in the trap of Nietzsche, playing with death and violence and negativity, playing out the death of some old and obsolete notions of the world. But these people are more and more irrelevant; what's interesting is that some artists have understood that the world's not going to end soon, that the twenty-first century is going to be an extraordinary time, and that the time is now to begin imagining what direction the human community may go in — Lee Smolin

I found myself in my first art school under the direction of Robert Henri ... My life began at this point. — George Bellows

To begin with, I hold that there is never an end; everything of which our life is composed, pictures and books as much as anything else, is a means only, in the sense that the work of art exists in the body of the movement of life. It may be a strong factor of progress and direction, but we cannot say that it is the end or reason of things, for it is so much implicated with them ; and when we are speaking of art we suddenly find that we are talking of life all the time. — Wyndham Lewis

Organic growth is a cyclical process; it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end. — W. H. Auden

In any organization there ought to be the possibility of discussion ... fence sitting is an art, and it's difficult, and it's important to do, rather than to go headlong in one direction or the other. It's just better to have action, isn't it than to sit on the fence? Not if you're not sure which way to go, it isn't. — Richard P. Feynman

What's with the serum?"
I don't know, but it sounds ominous. We better put a telepathic direction finder on Benway. The man's not to be trusted. Might do almost anything ... Turn a massacre into a sex orgy ... "
Or a joke."
Precisely. Arty type ... No principles ... — William S. Burroughs

When I was writing songs or performing or producing or dabbling in movies or even putting my career on hold to go to art school, I was just following my muse. A woman who did that then was criticized for having no direction. Today they call it versatility. — Jackie DeShannon

In on summer they have done their business ... they have completely pulled down to the ground their monarchy, their church, their nobility, their law, their revenue, their army, their navy, their commerce, their arts, and their manufactures ... destroyed all balances and counterpoises which serve to fix a state and give it steady direction, and then they melted down the whole into one incongrous mass of mob and democracy ... the people, along with their political servitude, have thrown off the yoke of law and morals. — Edmund Burke

She doesn't give you time for questions as she locks up your arms in hers. And you follow till your sense of direction completely disappears. — Al Stewart

We are continually being nudged by our devices toward a set of choices. The question is whether those choices are leading us to the life we actually want. I want a life of conversation and friendship, not distraction and entertainment; but every day, many times a day, I'm nudged in the wrong direction. One key part of the art of living faithfully with technology is setting up better nudges for ourselves. — Andy Crouch

The truth is that sometimes art may not exactly reflect one's personal politics, but the story, the drama, the thing you're trying to say, might want to go in a certain direction, and while it may seem like it has resonance with things that are happening topically, you kind of want the world you're creating to have its own internal logic. — Tim Minear

If you take 2001: A Space Odyssey as an example of somebody who creates a new language in film by what he was able to accomplish with art direction, photography, lighting, etc., it is still a gold standard for science fiction. — Matthew Modine

Nature and training (in any sport or art) can teach us all the spiritual laws I describe in another book, The Laws of Spirit. But now I'm happy to share these four purposes of life that lend meaning and direction to anyone's life, especially those in transition, going through changes. — Dan Millman

My failure, during the first five or six years of my art training, to get set in the right direction, and the disappointment which it caused me, drove me the more persistently into writing as an alternative. — Laurence Housman

I think there's a responsibility more as an artist to try and push in the direction you think comedy should go ... The biggest thing I could do for the art that I love was keeping it art: keeping it special, keeping it honest, keeping it truthful. — Jerrod Carmichael

Making beautiful things for everyday use is a wonderful thing to do - making life flow more easily - but art confronts life, allowing it to stop and perhaps change direction - they are completely different. — Antony Gormley

I have the belief that a person and his art should have one direction; your work should be a synonym for your person - the two shouldn't be separate. — Zhang Xiaogang

You never really know what the director has got in his mind as far as the scene visually and art direction wise. — Guy Pearce

From cradle to grave this problem of running order through chaos, direction through space, discipline through freedom, unity through multiplicity, has always been, and must always be, the task of education, as it is the moral of religion, philosophy, science, art, politics and economy; but a boy's will is his life, and he dies when it is broken, as the colt dies in harness, taking a new nature in becoming tame ... — Henry Adams

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony not understood All partial Evil, universal Good. - ALEXANDER POPE, An Essay on Man — Thomas H. Cook

I go to universities to talk to the students and teach them how to watch movies. Movies have so many elements - acting, music, art direction, costumes. I also tell them not to watch pirated movies. At the cinema, they can enjoy the big screen and the surround sound. — Andrew Lau

Cease then, nor ORDER Imperfection name:
Our proper bliss depends on what we blame.
Know thy own point: This kind, this due degree
Of blindness, weakness, Heav'n bestows on thee.
Submit
In this, or any other sphere,
Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear:
Safe in the hand of one disposing Pow'r,
Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony, not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good:
And, spite of Pride, in erring Reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever IS, is RIGHT. — Alexander Pope

To be a writer and political is a dangerous thing. To be a writer and apolitical is even more dangerous. Art is right, left; in truth, it has only one direction and that is forward. — Chris Campanioni

It was really executed well, from the art direction to the wardrobe to everyone else. And I have to say, two really exceptional directors who did three each. Roxann [Dawson] did the first three and Jeremy [Webb] did the second three. And I think they really were very meticulous in getting the right tone because it is both. It isn't dour and it isn't grim, but it's not a romp either. It's truthful and it has room for both of those things. — Gary Cole

I often had to pass over photographs because in a mass of animals invariably one would be wandering in the wrong direction, thereby disrupting the pattern I was trying to achieve. Today the ability to digitally alter this disruption is at hand. — Art Wolfe

The art of DJing is sharing music with one another ... The technology's definitely taking it into a new direction to where it's really becoming performance-based. — Kaskade

All "if" statements about the past are as dubious as prophecies of the future are. It seems fairly plausible that if Alexander or Ghengis Khan had never been born, some other individual would have filled his place and executed the design of the Hellenic or Mongolic expansion; but the Alexanders of philosophy and religion, of science and art, seem less expendable; their impact seems less determined by economic challenges and social pressures; and they seem to have a much wider range of possibilities to influence the direction, shape and texture of civilizations. — Arthur Koestler

Where war destroys, art inspires. And in order to inspire, you need to penetrate the brain. In order to penetrate the brain, you need something to react to. To have something to react to, you need to get your emotions up and running. To get your emotions up and running, you need to have something that ... whatever direction you go in, it has to be a movement between you and the experience. — Nicolas Winding Refn

Of course, it's wonderful to film any period piece - but especially 'Foyle's War' because the art direction is so imaginative and yet at the same time so real. You can open a drawer on set, and even though the camera never sees what's inside, it'll be filled with genuine 1940s documents. — Honeysuckle Weeks

I'm pretty committed to being a filmmaker because it incorporates everything I love: music, art direction, story, and you know - everything. — Adria Petty

Come with me." He led her to the beach again, but during dinner a few people had been busy. It was now lined with an aisle of candles. A man stood close to the breaking surf, hands crossed, waiting. Someone had used the surrounding sand as a canvas, creating a swirling pattern. Their names were part of the art.
What? She asked without a sound.
"I want you to marry me. Here. Now."
Beckett let go of her hand and strode away from her. When he turned around, close to the water at the end of the aisle, he hoped to hell she wasn't running in the other direction. — Debra Anastasia

You want to know if we're animals? When I'm on stage with the volume rippling my body like a glass of water and thousands of people are generating heat in my direction, there's no time for thought. My basement facilities take over completely. Sure it's animal. People might like to talk about art, but look where art is, in the gutter. — David Lee Roth

But, curiously, Peter did not grasp - perhaps he did not wish to grasp - the political implications of this new view of man. He had not gone to the West to study "the art of government." Although in Protestant Europe he was surrounded by evidence of the new civil and political rights of individual men embodied in constitutions, bills of rights and parliaments, he did not return to Russia determined to share power with his people. On the contrary, he returned not only determined to change his country but also convinced that if Russia was to be transformed, it was he who must provide both the direction and the motive force. He would try to lead; but where education and persuasion were not enough, he would drive - and if necessary flog - the backward nation forward. — Robert K. Massie

One way to cope with the provocations of novel art is to rest firm and maintain solid standards ... set by the critic's long-practiced taste and by his conviction that only those innovations will be significant which promote the established direction of advanced art. — Leo Steinberg

For over twenty-five centuries we've been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own.

This violence of landscape, this cruelty of climate, this continual tension in everything, and even these monuments of the past, magnificent yet incomprehensible because not built by us and yet standing round us like lovely mute ghosts; all those rulers who landed by main force from every direction who were at once obeyed, soon detested, and always misunderstood, their only expressions works of art we couldn't understand and taxes which we understood only too well and which they spent elsewhere: all these things have formed our character, which is thus conditioned by events outside our control as well as by a terrifying insularity of mind. — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

My mom is a painter and an artist. She would play music, and she always had very good taste in music, fashion, and art. She was also a young single mom, so I think she had really good style; she was really free ... just really inspiring in her own way and allowed me to find the direction I wanted to take in my life. — Ruby Rose

Generally, I move in the direction of art. — Michael Keaton

What is art? A violet. Is that all? An artistic style is a living entity, a continuous process of invention. It can never be imposed from without; born of the profoundest tendencies within a society, its direction is to a certain extent unpredictable, in much the same way as the eventual configuration of a tree's branches. — Octavio Paz

I like to mix pieces in my art direction from the '60s or the '40s and the '90s and present-day stuff. To me, that feels very real. When I go into people's houses, it's not all today. — Aaron Ruell

The first move toward the determination of the direction of my art was the fortunate invention of plans for Blok's wonder The Puppet Show. — Vsevolod Meyerhold

The art of nature is all in the direction of concealment. — John Burroughs

It is impossible for a Die, with such determin'd force and direction, not to fall on such determin'd side, only I don't know the force and direction which makes it fall on such determin'd side, and therefore I call it Chance, which is nothing but the want of art ... — John Arbuthnot

Science, my dears, is the systematic dissection of nature, to reduce it to working parts that more or less obey universal laws. Sorcery moves in the opposite direction. It doesn't rend, it repairs. It is synthesis rather than analysis. It builds anew rather than revealing the old. In the hands of someone truly skilled, ... it is Art. — Gregory Maguire

Definitely, and it's getting more spiritual. Pretty soon I believe people will have to rely on music to get some kind of peace of mind, or satisfaction, or direction, actually. More so than politics, the big ego scene. You know it's an art of words ... Meaning nothing. Therefore you will have to get an earthier substance, like music or the arts. — Jimi Hendrix

The voice of our age seems by no means favorable to art, at all events to that kind of art to which my inquiry is directed. The course of events has given a direction to the genius of the time that threatens to remove it continually further from the ideal of art. For art has to leave reality, it has to raise itself bodily above necessity and neediness; for art is the daughter of freedom, and it requires its prescriptions and rules to be furnished by the necessity of spirits and not by that of matter. — Friedrich Schiller

Direction is the most invisible part of the theatrical art. You don't see it. — Terry Teachout

It's all right to change your mind about a situation, even if it's in mid-course without fear that you're missing something. You know, if you're not there, it's not happening for you at that time. All you're doing is changing direction. — Art Hochberg

In other words, since immense is not an object, a phenomenology of immense would refer us directly to our imagining consciousness. In analyzing images of immensity, we should realize within ourselves the pure being of pure imagination. It then becomes clear that works of art are the by-products of this existentialism of the imagining being. In this direction of daydreams of immensity, the real product is consciousness of enlargement. We fell that we have been promoted to the dignity of the admiring being. — Gaston Bachelard

What you have to do is disavow yourself from any sense other than ascendancy. That's the only direction you could possibly have towards painting. There's no other direction at all. There's no other space in art. There's no other way in which you can find yourself except in somehow feeling it. And by holding to this feeling you can once again reach out and guess and miss - and sometimes hit. — Milton Resnick

Our vanity, our passions, our spirit of imitation, our abstract intelligence, our habits have long been at work, and it is the task of art to undo this work of theirs, making us travel back in the direction from which we have come to the depths where what has really existed lies unknown within us. — Marcel Proust

I don't know if One Direction will stand the test of time. I have a niece who goes crazy for them. But the only way to judge art is to wait and see if it becomes evergreen. This takes a bit of time. Adele is a very good musician and I'd like to sing with her. But, again, time will tell if her music will become evergreen. — Andrea Bocelli

I love to read about music and about art, but I don't try and take things about mythology or guidelines as to how I'm to behave as an artist. It's the realm of intellectual debate. Actually, more and more my direction is trying to get further away from being self-conscious of what the parameters are of the mainstream, where it intersects with the underground. — Emily Haines

Science begins with the world we have to live in, accepting its data and trying to explain its laws. From there, it moves toward the imagination: it becomes a mental construct, a model of a possible way of interpreting experience. The further it goes in this direction, the more it tends to speak the language of mathematics, which is really one of the languages of the imagination, along with literature and music. Art, on the other hand, begins with the world we construct, not with the world we see. It starts with the imagination, and then works toward ordinary experience. — Northrop Frye

As I said before, I took to miniature painting without a completely whole heart, on the advice of my elders and betters. Generally speaking, I do not think that one should ever take another person's advice in the things of life that really matter, but follow the dictates of the still small something in one's innermost self. But 'they' advised, and I bowed to the advice; and in this particular instance it was a good thing I did, because the advice turned out to be so resoundingly wrong that it turned me into another direction altogether. If I had gone on working in oils I might very well have been a dedicated but unsuccessful painter to this day. — Rosemary Sutcliff

The refusal to be creative is an act of self-will and is counter to our true nature. When we are open to our creativity, we are opening to God: good, orderly direction. As we pursue our creative fulfillment, all elements of our life move toward harmony. As we strengthen our creativity, we strengthen our connection to the Creator within. Artists love other artists. Our relationship to God is co-creative, artist to artist. It is God's will for us to live in creative abundance. — Julia Cameron

It's kind of funny, with all of the different outlets that come from acting that you could try, I would love to direct and kind of be involved in art direction, too. — Imogen Poots

In a sense, every tool is a machine
the hammer, the ax, and the chisel. And every machine is a tool. The real distinction is between one man using a tool with his hands and producing an object that shows at every stage the direction of his will and the impression of his personality; and a machine which is producing, without the intervention of a particular man, objects of a uniformity and precision that show no individual variation and have no personal charm. The problem is to decide whether the objects of machine production can possess the essential qualities of art. — Herbert Read

That, chang'd thro' all and yet in all the same, Great in the Earth as in th' Aetherial frame, Warms in the Sun, refreshes in the Breeze, Glows in the Stars, and blossoms in the Trees ... Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part ... Submit - in this, or any other Sphere, Secure to be as blest as thou canst bear. All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee; All Chance, Direction which thou canst not see; All Discord, Harmony not understood ... All partial Evil, universal Good ... — Alexander Pope

I think the arts has great potential to create citizens. Citizenship is about the direction your imagination travels. We can't plan or calculate or examine citizenship; it's an imagined thing. Community is an imagined thing. And if your imagination isn't working - and, of course, in oppressed people that's the first thing that goes - you can't imagine anything better. Once you can imagine something different, something better, then you're on your way. — Lee Maracle

You can't rush art." I crumpled another lost attempt and tossed it behind me. "Besides, patience is a virtue."

"It's a virtue until it's a waste of time," he pointed out.

The cello unleashed a few notes that sounded strangely bright for such an instrument, and Hal nodded in its direction. "See; even a musical instrument agrees with me. — Mirriam Neal

The art of Navigation demonstrates how, by the shortest good way, by the aptest direction, and in the shortest time, a sufficient ship, between any two places (in passage navigable) assigned, may be conducted; and in all storms and natural disturbances chancing, how to use the best possible means, whereby to recover the place first assigned.
Mathematical Preface — John Dee

The main reason for civilization is that life is more comfortable. In a way, houses are there to protect us from rain, cold, and heat; cars are there to overcome distances. Culture is the exception. Music, art, and all of the different cultural expressions are not going in that direction. They're not about comfort; they're about understanding each other. — Pipilotti Rist

I remember when I was in art classes, I hated following the assignments. And I would get in trouble for doing something totally different or taking it in a weird direction. — Chang-rae Lee