Imitate Art Quotes & Sayings

Art does not imitate, but interpret. — Giuseppe Mazzini

It required some rudeness to disturb with our boat the mirror-like surface of the water, in which every twig and blade of grass was so faithfully reflected; too faithfully indeed for art to imitate, for only Nature may exaggerate herself. — Henry David Thoreau

At first, art imitates life. Then life will imitate art.Then life will find its very existence from the arts. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

Any person whom seeks to live a historical existence must devote their efforts to learning about the world, care about people and nature, and seek to express their thoughts in the artistic methodology most appropriate to their particular talent. A person cannot fake self-awareness or imitate an artistic nature. A person must honestly earn a heightened level of conscious awareness. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Contained within a given lesson or particular technique is the essence of all techniques. You imitate and study a particular form to grasp the universal principles that allow the technique to work in the first place and that will finally enable you to transcend the form itself to discover the formless. — H.E. Davey

After painting comes Sculpture, a very noble art, but one that does not in the execution require the same supreme ingenuity as the art of painting, since in two most important and difficult particulars, in foreshortening and in light and shade, for which the painter has to invent a process, sculpture is helped by nature. Moreover, Sculpture does not imitate color which the painter takes pains to attune so that the shadows accompany the lights. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Art does imitate life, it has to come from somewhere. To put boundaries and limitations on it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. — Christian Slater

When I look at the 'Rocky Balboa' film when I played the undisputed heavyweight champion, I feel like art is going to imitate life. I played the champ in a movie and I'm going to become the champ in reality. — Antonio Tarver

How life did imitate art sometimes. And the cruder the art, the closer the imitation. — Stephen King

Art does not imitate nature, but founds itself on the study of nature, takes from nature the selections which best accord with its own intention, and then bestows on them that which nature does not possess, viz: The mind and soul of man. — Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

A prince being thus obliged to know well how to act as a beast must imitate the fox and the lion, for the lion cannot protect himself from snares, and the fox cannot defend himself from wolves. One must therefore be a fox to recognise snares, and a lion to frighten wolves. Those that wish to be only lions do not understand this. — Niccolo Machiavelli

Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing. — Salvador Dali

The bad artists imitate, the great artists steal, — Banksy

A woman's beauty should not imitate art. — Lionel Suggs

But I think it will bring you something besides this, something that is the knowledge of real strength in art: not that you should imitate the works of these men; but their artistic spirit, their artistic attitude, I think you should absorb that. — Oscar Wilde

Not only does art imitate life but life imitates art. Perhaps we not only learn about life from stories, perhaps we make our lives through the stories we tell ourselves about the things that happen to us. — Ramona Koval

The primary function of art is not to imitate or represent or interpret, but to create a living thing; it is the reduction of all life to a perfectly composed and dynamic miniature - a microcosm where there is perfect balance of emotion and intellect, stress and strain resolving itself, form rhythmically poised in three dimensions. — Lawren Harris

I don't want life to imitate art. I want life to BE art. — Carrie Fisher

Man is simply playing by nature's rules,and art is man's attempt to imitate the beauty of the Creator's hand — Dan Brown

Some believe that art is the imitation of nature; in fact, nature is so sublime that it cannot be imitated. However noble it may be, art cannot perform a single one of the miracles of nature. And besides, why imitate nature when it can be perceived by all those endowed with senses? — Kahlil Gibran

[EM] Forster was the only living writer whom he would have described as his master. In other people's books he found examples of style which he wanted to imitate and learn from. In Forster he found a key to the whole art of writing. The Zen masters of archery - of whom, in those days, Christopher had never heard - start by teaching you the mental attitude with which you must pick up the bow. A Forster novel taught Christopher the mental attitude with which he must pick up the pen. — Christopher Isherwood

We must not imitate the externals of nature with so much fidelity that the picture fails to evoke that wonderful teasing recurrence of emotion that marks the contemplation of a work of art. — John F. Carlson

We must not imitate that which we seek to create. — Georges Braque

The best man can do is imitate nature with art. While nature can devour art and man. — A.E. Marling

Art does not imitate life. Art is much more powerful than that. Art brings life back. And it does it by exposing the secrets we all carry inside. — Jose Bernardo

Life doesn't imitate art ... it is art! — John Lennon

Let every Christian be a gardener so that he and she and the whole of creation, which groans in expectation of the Spirit's final harvest, may inherit Paradise. If we Christian's truly treasure the hope that one day we, like Adam and the penitent thief, will walk alongside the One who caused even the dead wood of the Cross to blossom with flowers, then we must also imitate the Master's art and make the desolate earth grow green. — Vigen Guroian

Life imitates art and art imitates life until both imitate imitation - Reality TV. — Brian Spellman

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television. — Woody Allen

Our sexual fantasies are often redundant and intense, like many other ideas involving ourselves. Most people approach sexuality limited to the idea that they should imitate other people, art (e.g., romantic literature) or movies (e.g., pornography). In this way, vicarious events and even fictions become a point of reference that we can actually feel. We judge actual people in our real lives against fictional events and unrealistic concepts. As such, real lovers seem inferior as a result. — Todd Vickers

Never hesitate to imitate another writer - every person learning a craft or an art needs models. Eventually you'll find your own voice and will shed the skin of the writer you imitated. — William Zinsser

The biggest thing is education for young chefs and how they should focus on one cuisine rather than trying to imitate too many. It's like art - you can see the cycles from many past artists and new artists being inspired by past artists. — Daniel Boulud

At our theaters we only see feeble copies of the copies that have proceeded them, renounce that slavish routine which keeps your art in its infancy; examine everything relative to the development of talents; be original; form a style for yourselves based on your private studies; if you must copy, imitate nature, it is a noble model and never misleads those who follow it. — Jean-Georges Noverre

If what you want to do is make good art, decide what's good and try to imitate it. — Robert Pinsky

In a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, all that is left is to imitate dead styles ... Contemporary or postmodernist art ... will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past. — Fredric Jameson

The arts are good and providential in that they allow the soul to imitate the movements of love, and to feel love without its being returned - which, perhaps, is the only way of feeling it permanently. — Marthe Bibesco

No form of nature is inferior to art; for the arts merely imitate natural forms. - Variant: There is no nature which is inferior to art, the arts imitate the nature of things. — Marcus Aurelius

Healing is a biological process, not an art. It is as much a function of the living organism as respiration, digestion, circulation, excretion, cell proliferation, or nerve activity. It is a ceaseless process, as constant as the turning of the earth on its axis. Man can neither duplicate nor imitate nor provide a substitute for the process. All schools of healing are frauds. — Herbert M. Shelton

In the twentieth century, science has been everything and the arts almost nothing by comparison. As a result, many artists now pretend to be scientists. They try to imitate the strategies of science. Paintings that talk. Sculpture that swims. Books that turn to ash. New formulas just like the scientist. But that isn't science of course, nor is it art. Just the end of the road. — Gore Vidal

To imitate nature involves the verb to do. To copy is merely to reflect something already there, inertly: Shakespeare's mirror is all that is needed for it. But by imitation we enlarge nature itself, we become nature or we discover in ourselves nature's active part. — William Carlos Williams

Works of art imitate and provoke other works of art, the process is the source of art itself. — Edward Hirsch

No one should ever imitate the style of another because, with regard to art, he will be called a nephew and not a child of nature. — Leonardo Da Vinci

Do not imitate one another's style. If you do, so far as your art is concerned you will be called a grandson, rather than the son of Nature. — Leonardo Da Vinci

The verb 'to darn' is explained in my pocket dictionary as follows: 'To mend by imitating the texture of the stuff, with thread and needle.' But this definition does not correspond to the work accomplished by good Chinese housewives. When they mend a sock, they do not try 'to imitate the texture of the stuff'. Their art makes no attempt at concealment: it even takes a certain pride in revealing itself. — Daniele Vare

I don't get it. I just don't get it. If Art is supposed to imitate Life, why do they want all the actors to be thin? There are fat people in the world. Shouldn't there be a few of us actors to represent them? — Camryn Manheim

We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it concrete art. — Hans Arp

The true end of Art is not to imitate a fixed material condition, but to represent a living motion, — George Inness

The mission of art is to represent nature not to imitate her. — William Morris Hunt

The disease of the soul is both more common and more deadly than the disease of the body. Just as medicine is the art devoted to healing the body, so philosophy is the art devoted to healing the soul, curing it of improper emotions, false beliefs, and faulty judgments, which are the causes of so much hardship and handicap. To heal the body one turns to the practitioner of the art of healing the body, but to heal the soul there is no doctor to turn to, and each of us is left to become that doctor unto himself. Yet, this need not stop us from exhorting others to imitate us in the godly art, in the forlorn hope that they might transform themselves into better citizens for Athens and better companions for us. — Neel Burton

One painter ought never to imitate the manner of any other; because in that case he cannot be called the child of nature, but the grandchild. It is always best to have recourse to nature, which is replete with such abundance of objects, than to the productions of other masters, who learnt everything from her. — Leonardo Da Vinci

It is justly considered as the greatest excellency of art, to imitate nature; but it is necessary to distinguish those parts of nature, which are most proper for imitation: greater care is still required in representing life, which is so often discoloured by passion, or deformed by wickedness. If the world be promiscuously described, I cannot see of what use it can be to read the account; or why it may not be as safe to turn the eye immediately upon mankind as upon a mirrour which shews all — Samuel Johnson

Why so? one would think at such a time you would most exult in your privilege of being able to imitate the various brilliant and delightful touches of nature. — Anne Bronte

The feat of superbly imitating a muscle, as Michelangelo did, or a face, as Raphael did, created neither progress nor a hierarchy in art. Because these artists of the sixteenth century imitated human forms, they were not superior to the artists of the high periods of Egyptian, Chaldean, Indochinese, Roman, and Gothic art who interpreted and stylized form but did not imitate it. — Fernand Leger

So true it is, that nature has caprices which art cannot imitate. — Thomas B. Macaulay

I hope it might help players have confidence in our own ways, and not to be afraid of them, as Bernstein showed - things like hoe-downs, fiddle songs, and the art of improvisation, and the New Orleans funeral tradition, and call-and-response church singing, and the fact that the blues run through everything. And in our relationship to European music, in that we don't have to imitate it, it's a part of us, inseparable. — Wynton Marsalis

I have studied the art of the masters and the art of the moderns, avoiding any preconceived system and without prejudice. I have no more wanted to imitate the former than to copy the latter; nor have I thought of achieving the idle aim of art for art's sake. — Gustave Courbet

To admire on principle is the only way to imitate without loss of originality. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge

As animals have no idea of the holy or the devil, they have no idea of the beautiful. The opinion held by some scientists that apes could paint, based on the 'paintings' apes had done, proved to be quite wrong. It has been confirmed that apes only imitate man. So- called 'ape art' surely does not exist. On the contrary, the cave men from Cromagnon onward knew how to paint and care. Their drawings have been found in caves of the Sahara, in Spain at Altamira, in Franc at Lascaux, and recently in Poland at Mashicka. Many of these pictures are thought to be more than 30,000 years old. Some time ago, a group of Soviet archeologists discovered a set of musical instruments, made 20,000 years ago, near the town of Chernigov in the Ukraine. — Alija Izetbegovic

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation. — Edgar Degas

I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false. — Gerhard Richter

The function of Art is to imitate Nature in her manner of operation. Our understanding of her manner of operation&Rdquo; changes according to advances in the sciences. — John Cage

Art may imitate life, but life imitates TV. — Ani DiFranco

Let art, then, imitate nature, find what she desires, and follow as she directs. For in invention nature is never last, education never first; rather the beginnings of things arise from natural talent, and ends are reached by discipline. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Does art imitate life, or does life imitate TV? — Woody Allen