Art Necessity Quotes & Sayings

Art is personal, originating from dreams, ideas, neuroses; art is shared, harkening back to the humans around the fire; art imbues pleasure and power by enabling people to know reality ... Art is a necessity because it is a way of knowing ... Is the need for truth physiological? Art exists out of time ... images may be different bu there is always a repetition- a thread. — Zelda Fichandler

Necessity is stronger far than art. — Aeschylus

E have become wealthy, and wealth is the prelude to art. In every country where centuries of physical effort have accumulated the means for luxury and leisure, culture has followed as naturally as vegetation grows in a rich and watered soil. To have become wealthy was the first necessity; a people too must live before it can philosophize. No doubt we have grown faster than nations usually have grown; and the disorder of our souls is due to the rapidity of our development. We are like youths disturbed and unbalanced, for a time, by the sudden growth and experiences of puberty. But soon our maturity will come; our minds will catch up with our bodies, our culture with our possessions. Perhaps there are greater souls than Shakespeare's, and greater minds than Plato's, waiting to be born. When we have learned to reverence liberty as well as wealth, we too shall have our Renaissance. — Will Durant

The art of writing is the art of doing what you think you're doing. This is not as simple as it sounds. It implies a very difficult undertaking: the necessity to think. And it implies the requirement to think out three separate, very hard problems: What is it you want to say? How are you going to say it? Have you really said it? — Ayn Rand

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps. — Elizabeth George

Sheer necessity,-the proper parent of an art so nearly allied to invention. — Richard Brinsley Sheridan

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other. — Neal Cassady

... Any talent - whether to write songs or to write novels...came with the obligation to use it to the fullest of one's ability, with a fierce commitment barely distinguishable from neurotic obsession. ... In fact...commitment to the point of obsession wasn't merely an obligation but a necessity... — Dean Koontz

The reply is, that one ought to be both feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting. For it may be said of men in general that they are ungrateful, voluble, dissemblers, anxious to avoid danger, and covetous of gain as long as you benefit them, they are entirely yours; they offer you their blood, their goods, their life, and their children, as I have before said, when the necessity is remote; but when it approaches, they revolt. — Niccolo Machiavelli

A key to my thinking has always been the almost fanatical belief that what I was engaged in was a literary art form. That belief was compounded out of ego and necessity, I guess, a combination of the two. — Will Eisner

Beauty, which is what is meant by art, using the word in its widest sense, is, I contend, no mere accident to human life, which people can take or leave as they choose, but a positive necessity of life. — William Morris

Humanity is as horrified and repulsed by real nature as it is by real death. Thus, we strike back against this formidable opponent with our sharpest weapon: our imagination. From this noble tool - born of necessity and elevated to beauty - culture was born, and the war against nature begun. — Anthony Marais

The art of our necessities is strange
That can make vile things precious. — William Shakespeare

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality ... true art lies in a reality that is felt. — Odilon Redon

The necessity of loyalty between friends, the responsibility that the strong owe the infirm, the illusion of ill-gotten gain, the rewards of hard work, honesty, and trust-these are enduring truths glimpsed and judged first through the imagination, first through art. — Michael Dorris

But before all else a work of art is the creation of love. Love for the subject first and for the medium second. Love is the fundamental necessity underlying the need to create, underlying the emotion that gives it form, and from which grows the unfinished product that is presented to the world. Love is the general criterion by which the rare photograph is judged. It must contain it to be not less than the best of which the photographer is capable. — Eliot Porter

I remember being disappointed when Papa had shown me Caravaggio's Judith. She was completely passive while she was sawing through a man's neck. Caravaggio gave all the feeling to the man. Apparently, he couldn't imagine a woman to have a single thought. I wanted to paint her thoughts, if such a thing were possible
determination and concentration and belief in the absolute necessity of the act. The fate of her people resting on her shoulders ... — Susan Vreeland

He who expects from a great name in politics, in philosophy, in art, equal greatness in other things, is little versed in human nature. Our strength lies in our weakness. The learned in books are ignorant of the world. He who is ignorant of books is often well acquainted with other things; for life is of the same length in the learned and unlearned; the mind cannot be idle; if it is not taken up with one thing, it attends to another through choice or necessity; and the degree of previous capacity in one class or another is a mere lottery. — William Hazlitt

Progress comes by experiment, and this from ennui that leads to voyages, wars, revolutions, and plainly to change in the arts of expression; that cries out to the imagination, and is the nurse of the invention whereof we term necessity the mother. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

But the thing that stands eternally in the way of really good writing is always one: the virtual impossibility of lifting to the imagination those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose. It is this difficulty that sets a value upon all works of art and makes them a necessity. The senses witnessing what is immediately before them in detail see a finality which they cling to in despair, not knowing which way to turn. Thus this so-called natural or scientific array becomes fixed, the walking devil of modern life. — William Carlos Williams

Know Thyself. It's good advice. Know yourself. You are worth knowing. Examine your life. The unexamined life is not worth living. Be aware that other people have equal significance. Give them the space to make their own choices, and let their choices count as you want them to let your choices count. Remember that excellence has no stopping point and keep on pursuing it. Make art that can last and that says something nobody else can say. Live the best life you can, and become the best self you can. You cannot know which of your actions is the lever that will move worlds. Not even Necessity knows all ends. Know yourself. — Jo Walton

The task of a philosophy of photography is to reflect upon this possibility of freedom - and thus its significance - in a world dominated by apparatuses; to reflect upon the way in which, despite everything, it is possible for human beings to give significance to their lives in the face of the chance necessity of death. Such a philosophy is necessary because it is the only form of revolution left open to us. — Vilem Flusser

Contrary to the current presumption, if there is any man who has no right to solitude, it is the artist. Art cannot be a monologue. When the most solitary and least famous artist appeals to posterity, he is merely reaffirming his fundamental vocation. Considering a dialogue with deaf or inattentive contemporaries to be impossible, he appeals to a more far-reaching dialogue with the generations to come. But in order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death - these are the things that unite us all. We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together. Dreams change from individual to individual, but the reality of the world is common to us all. — Albert Camus

Trauma and pain are the foundations of art. I believe that. When tragedy strikes, however, a muralist or a watercolorist has the opportunity to be a human being in the moment and an artist afterward. Faced with the death of a loved one, a sculptor or portraitist can first grieve, suffer, and heal--then create. Most artists go through life this way. They can react normally to the trials and tribulations of the human experience. They can pass through the world with compassion and comradeship. They can make their art later. Outside, elsewhere, beyond. But photography is immediate. It does not offer the luxury of time. Faced with blood, death, or transformation, a photographer has no choice but to reach for the camera. An artist first, a human being afterward. Photography is a neutral record of all events, a chronicle of things both sublime and terrible. By necessity, this work is made without emotion, without connection, without love. — Abby Geni

Central heating, French rubber goods and cookbooks are three amazing proofs of man's ingenuity in transforming necessity into art, and, of these, cookbooks are perhaps most lastingly delightful. — M.F.K. Fisher

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

Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird? Why does one love the night, flowers, everything around one, without trying to understand them? But in the case of a painting people have to understand. If only they would realize above all that an artist works of necessity, that he himself is only a trifling bit of the world, and that no more importance should be attached to him than to plenty of other things which please us in the world, though we can't explain them. People who try to explain pictures are usually barking up the wrong tree. — Pablo Picasso

Magical activity is a kind of dynamo supplying the mechanisms of practical life with the emotional current that drives it. Hence, magic is a necessity of every sort and condition of man, and is actually found in every healthy society. — Herbert Read

Put crudely, one is left with a choice between two unsatisfactory combinations: artistic integrity married to spiritual compromise; and spiritual integrity married to artistic banality-or, worse, art compromised on both counts. Neither one will satisfy those who recognize the fundamental necessity of integrity in both faith and art. — John Walford

The mother of useful arts is necessity; that of the fine arts is luxury. For father the former has intellect; the latter genius, which itself is a kind of luxury. — Arthur Schopenhauer

Fertilization of the soul is the reason for the necessity of art. — Alfred North Whitehead

The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers' hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

A work of art is good if it has grown out of necessity. In this manner of its origin lies its true estimate: there is no other. Therefore, my dear Sir, I could give you no advice but this: to go into yourself and to explore the depths whence your life wells forth; at its source you will find the answer to the question whether you must create. — Rainer Maria Rilke

We need to make sure that the powers that be know that arts education is as vital and as important as geography and arithmetic. You know, it is a part of the spiritual and the soulful experience and expression of being human and it is a necessity, as necessary as water, as breathing air. — Rosie O'Donnell

Art is not concerned with the meditation about what is and how it came to be. That is a task for knowledge. Knowledge is born of the desire to know, Art derives from the necessity to communicate and to announce. — Naum Gabo

An original is a creation motivated by desire. Any reproduction of an originals motivated be necessity. It is marvelous that we are the only species that creates gratuitous forms. To create is divine, to reproduce is human. — Man Ray

Art is a necessity - an essential part of our enlightenment process. We cannot, as a civilized society, regard ourselves as being enlightened without the arts. — Ken Danby

To eat is a necessity, but to eat intelligently is an art. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

The essential in artistic creativity is victory over the burden of necessity. In art, man lives outside himself, outside his burdens, the burdens of life. Every creative artistic act is a partial transfiguration of life. In the artistic concept man breaks out through the heaviness of the world. In the creative-artistic attitude towards this world we catch a glimpse of another world. — Nikolai Berdyaev

Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is the one which is the most secret, which requires the least physical labor, the least material, and the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper. Over the last few years, writing a novel on tight finances, I came to appreciate the enormous differences in the material demands between poetry and prose. As we reclaim our literature, poetry has been the major voice of poor, working class, and Colored women. A room of one's own may be a necessity for writing prose, but so are reams of paper, a typewriter, and plenty of time. — Audre Lorde

When Socrates was about 30, and his father was long dead, he was still pursuing the art of sculpture, but from necessity, and without much inclination. — Moses Mendelssohn

Art is a luxury but also a necessity. — Edwidge Danticat

If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor. — W. H. Auden

The spider's lesson is never to be greedy. It shows that objects of necessity can be objects of beauty and art as well. The spider teaches us that we can be too easily enraptured with ourselves. — Marlo Morgan

We settled this continent without art. So it was easy for us to treat it as an imported luxury, not a necessity. — Arthur Erickson

To surround yourself with beauty isn't frivolous. It's a necessity. If it weren't, then our cities would not be surrounded with art museums and parks. — Charlotte Symonds

If you're looking for fine art or literature, you might want to read some stuff written by the Greeks. Because to create true fine art, slaves are a necessity. That's how the ancient Greeks felt, with slaves working the fields, cooking their meals, rowing their ships, all the while their citizens, under the Mediterranean Sun, indulged in poetry writing and grappled with mathematics. That was their idea of fine art. — Haruki Murakami

Antique art has come down to us in a fragmentary condition, and we have virtuously adapted our taste to this necessity. Almost all our favorite specimens of Greek sculpture, from the sixth century onward, were originally parts of compositions, and if we were faced with the complete group in which the Charioteer of Delphi was once a subsidiary figure, we might well experience a moment of revulsion. We have come to think of the fragment as more vivid, more concentrated, and more authentic. — Kenneth Clark

I believe that architecture is a pragmatic art. To become art it must be built on a foundation of necessity. — I.M. Pei

The artist must be blind to "recognized" and "unrecognized" form, deaf to the teachings and desires of his time. His open eyes must be directed to his inner life and his ears must be constantly attuned to the voice of inner necessity. — Wassily Kandinsky

Around the time of the Terran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been composing a work of art. It could have been called a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity. Since it could be experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth might have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter which category it be assigned. — Robert A. Heinlein

To contradict, even in little matters, is the supreme necessity of art today. — Witold Gombrowicz

We realise that natural aptitudes are not interchangeable, and each person must, of biological or spiritual necessity, practise the art for which he is fitted. — George William Russell

Art and relligion are not professions: they are not occupations for which men can be paid. The artist and the saint do what they have to do, not to make a living, but in obedience to some mysterious necessity. They do not product to live - they live to produce. — Clive Bell

The world is moving into a phase when landscape design may well be recognized as the most comprehensive of the arts. Man creates around him an environment that is a projection into nature of his abstract ideas. It is only in the present century that the collective landscape has emerged as a social necessity. We are promoting a landscape art on a scale never conceived of in history (Geoffrey Jellicoe, Landscape of man) — Tom Turner

Art is not a luxury, but a necessity. — Rebecca West

Industry in art is a necessity - not a virtue - and any evidence of the same, in the production, is a blemish, not a quality; a proof, not of achievement, but of absolutely insufficient work, for work alone will efface the footsteps of work. — James McNeill Whistler

All art is concerned with coming into being; for it is concerned neither with things that are, or come into being by necessity, nor with things that do so in accordance with nature. — Aristotle.

Travel by canoe is not a necessity, and will nevermore be the most efficient way to get from one region to another, or even from one lake to another anywhere. A canoe trip has become simply a rite of oneness with certain terrain, a diversion off the field, an art performed not because it is a necessity but because there is value in the art itself. — John McPhee

Verbal virtuosities or the gratuitous expense of time or money that is presupposed by material or symbolic appropriation of works of art, or even, at the second power, the self-imposed constraints and restrictions which make up the "asceticism of the privileged" (as Marx said of Seneca) and the refusal of the facile which is the basis of all "pure" aesthetics, are so many repetition of that variant of the master-slave dialectic through which the possessors affirm their possession of their possessions. In so doing, they distance themselves still further from the dispossessed, who, not content with being slaves to necessity in all its forms, are suspected of being possessed by the desire for possession, and so potentially possessed by the possessions they do not, or do not yet, possess. — Pierre Bourdieu

There's a radical change in the relationship with the human being and society. Art now is an open conversation with the society. Previously there was a necessity for a little bit of screaming and shouting just to get it into the conversation. — Lawrence Weiner

Your life will contribute to a grand and wonderful story no matter what you do. You have been spoken. You are here, existing, choosing, living, shaping the future and carving the past. Your physical matter and your soul exist, not out of necessity, not voluntarily, and not under their own strength. There is absolutely nothing that you or I can do to guarantee that we will continue to exist. You aren't doing anything that makes you be. We aren't the Author. You and I are spoken. We have been called into this art as characters, born into this thread of occurrence tumbling downstream in the long Niagara of loss set in motion by the trouble that faced our first father and first mother. We will contribute to this narrative. But how? — N.D. Wilson

It may be that the deep necessity of art is the examination of self-deception. — Robert Motherwell

Wilderness, to me, is a spiritual necessity. The mysterious spiritual experience of being close to natural restored my soul [after the death of his son]. My experience reinforced by dedication to use the art of photography as an inspiration for others to work together to save nature's places of spiritual sanctuary for future generations. — Clyde Butcher

That is what is wrong with cold people. Not that they have ice in their souls - we all have a bit of that - but that they insist every word and deed mirror that ice. They never learn the beauty or value of gesture. The emotional necessity. For them, it is all honesty before kindness, truth before art. Love is art, not truth. It's like painting scenery. — Lorrie Moore

Art is far feebler than necessity. — Aeschylus

Surviving is a necessity. Living is an art. — Cathryn Louis

All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote. We quote not only books and proverbs, but arts, sciences, religion, customs, and laws; nay, we quote temples and houses, tables and chairs, by imitation. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The tyranny of necessity grants its slaves three kinds of freedom: opinion free from intellect, entertainment free from art, and orgies free from love. — Karl Kraus

The very problem of mind and body suggests division; I do not know of anything so disastrously affected by the habit of division as this particular theme. In its discussion are reflected the splitting off from each other of religion, morals and science; the divorce of philosophy from science and of both from the arts of conduct. The evils which we suffer in education, in religion, in the materialism of business and the aloofness of "intellectuals" from life, in the whole separation of knowledge and practice
all testify to the necessity of seeing mind-body as an integral whole. — John Dewey

It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival. — Criss Jami

Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. — Rebecca West

That beauty which is meant by art is no mere accident of human life which people can take or leave, but a positive necessity of life if we are to live as nature meant us to, that is to say unless we are content to be less than men. — Oscar Wilde

There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace. There, too, is the necessity of his work: His tribe must be in short supply; his job has gone begging. The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls. Indeed, the whole distinction between art and trash, between food and garbage, depends on the presence or absence of the loving eye. Turn a statue over to a boor, and his boredom will break it to bits - witness the ruined monuments of antiquity. On the other hand, turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little and its numbed surfaces prickle with feeling. — Robert Farrar Capon

There is only one way: Go within. Search for the cause, find the impetus that bids you write. Put it to this test: Does it stretch out its roots in the deepest place of your heart? Can you avow that you would die if you were forbidden to write? Above all, in the most silent hour of your night, ask yourself this: Must I write? Dig deep into yourself for a true answer. And if it should ring its assent, if you can confidently meet this serious question with a simple, "I must," then build your life upon it. It has become your necessity. Your life, in even the most mundane and least significant hour, must become a sign, a testimony to this urge. — Rainer Maria Rilke

I want to promote the introduction of art history in primary schools and to convince the general public that, even in a period of economic crisis, arts funding is an absolute necessity at the federal, state, and local levels. — Camille Paglia

We were suddenly faced with the necessity of training a lot of young men in the art of navigation. — Clyde Tombaugh

The belly (i.e. necessity) is the teacher of art and the liberal bestower of wit. — Aulus Persius Flaccus

Then I realized the vital necessity of art. Human life, yes, you nurse people, you clean house, you market, but then comes the moment of solace and flight. i sit and write and summon other friends, other forms of life, other experiences, and the voyage and the exploration, the delving into character, the vast expanse of life's possibilities and potentialities, contemplation of future travels, of dazzling friendships, all this then makes the chores and the sacrifices beautiful because they are diverted toward some beautiful aim, they become part of the structure of a work of art. — Anais Nin

Art is borne out of necessity. Music is a tool and men are doers. When a relationship is working, you don't need to write a song-you need to get toilet paper. — Sxip Shirey

Those of us living in the Islamic Republic of Iran grasped both the tragedy and absurdity of the
cruelty to which we were subjected. We had to poke fun at our own misery in order to survive.
We also instinctively recognized poshlust-not just in others, but in ourselves. This was one reason
that art and literature became so essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity.
What Nabokov captured was the texture of life in a totalitarian society, where you are completely
alone in an illusory world full of false promises, where you can no longer differentiate between
your savior and your executioner. — Azar Nafisi

Concision in art is a necessity and an elegance. The verbose painter bores: who will get rid of all these trimmings? — Edouard Manet

Art is water, and just as humans are always close to water, for reasons of necessity (to drink, to wash, to flush away, to grow) as well as for reasons of pleasure (to play in, to swim in, to relax in front of, to sail upon, to suck on frozen, coloured and sweetened), so humans must always be close to art in all its incarnations, from the frivolous to the essential. Otherwise we dry up. — Yann Martel

His art springs out of bubbling underground necessity, as if he's somehow dipping himself into the river that gave him life; he's making dream material visible. — Anne Lamott

Minnesotans who bought scenic art usually avoided winter scenes. Hannah didn't find that surprising. Minnesota winters were long. Why would they want to buy a painting that would constantly remind them of the bone-chilling cold, the heavy snow that had to be shoveled, and the necessity of dressing up in survival gear to do nothing more than take out the garbage? — Joanne Fluke

The highest art is where has been most perfectly breathed the sentiment of humanity ... Some persons suppose that landscape has no power of communicating human sentiment. But this is a great mistake. The civilized landscape peculiarly can: and therefore I love it more and think it more worthy of reproduction than that which is savage and untamed. It is more significant. Every act of man, every thing of labor, effort, suffering, want, anxiety, necessity, love, marks itself wherever it has been. — George Inness

Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write. — Aleksandar Hemon

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

All these troubles revolve around the irritable mutual dependence of life and art - with their need and contempt for one another. Of necessity, to create is a temporary state and cannot be possessed ... — Philip Guston

The mathematician may be compared to a designer of garments, who is utterly oblivious of the creatures whom his garments may fit. To be sure, his art originated in the necessity for clothing such creatures, but this was long ago; to this day a shape will occasionally appear which will fit into the garment as if the garment had been made for it. Then there is no end of surprise and delight. — George Dantzig

The creation of a work of art must of necessity, as a result of entering into the specific dimensions of pictorial art, be accompanied by distortion of the natural form. For, therein is nature reborn. — Paul Klee