Anais Nin Quotes

Filling a space in a beautiful way - that is what art means to me.

And if out of a million visitors there is even one to whom art means something, that is enough to justify museums.

Dear God! how beauty varies in nature and art.

Nowadays, an artist is someone who makes art mean the things he does.

The closer and more completely you can come to explaining what a work of art means, the less like art it seems.

By beauty of course I mean truth, for the one involves the other; it is only the false in art which is ugly, and it is only the ugly that is universal.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words…By means of art were are sometimes sent - dimly, briefly - revelations unattainable by reason.

It became a question of taste. I have a certain taste in art history. And that - I had a huge library of art history books in my studio. And I would simply have the models go through those books with me, and we began a conversation about, like, what painting means, why we do it, why people care about it why or how it can mean or make sense today.

My aim is to give you only the things with which I am completely satisfied, even if it means asking you a little more [time] for them... for if I were to do otherwise I'd turn into a mere painting machine and you would be landed with a pile of incomplete work which would put off the most enthusiastic of art collectors.

The child is really an artist, and the artist should be like a child, but he should not stay a child. He must become an artist. That means he cannot permit himself to become sentimental or something like that. He must know what he is doing

When faced with the inevitable, you always have a choice... As I learned during my liberal arts education, any symbol can have, in the imaginative context, two versions, a positive and a negative... If you spill your milk you're left with a glass which is either half empty or half full... You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude towards it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality. Try it and see.

Pictures are the idea in visual or pictorial form; and the idea has to be legible, both in the individual picture and in the collective context - which presupposes, of course, that words are used to convey information about the idea and the context. However, none of this means that pictures function as illustrations of an idea: ultimately, they are the idea. Nor is the verbal formulation of the idea a translation of the visual: it simply bears a certain resemblance to the meaning of the idea. It is an interpretation, literally a reflection.

The object of science is knowledge; the objects of art are works. In art, truth is the means to an end; in science, it is the only end. Hence the practical arts are not to be classed among the sciences

Just because some of us make a mistake in love once doesn't mean we're doomed to repeat it.

What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of beauty.

Statistics is the art of lying by means of figures.

To follow art for the sake of being a great man, and therefore to cast about continually for some means of achieving position or attracting admiration, is the surest way of ending in total extinction.

I think didactic art is boring. I mean, I love it in terms of, like, some of the historical precedents that I've learned from. You needed that. We needed those building blocks in terms of - you know, when I look at a great Barbara Kruger, for example, and you're thinking about, you know, the woman's position in society - you know, she found a way of making it beautiful, but at the same time it's very sort of preachy, you know what I mean?

I don't want to hold out false hopes that the - by some magic moment, that things will turn around in a couple months because they wouldn't, Charlie. I mean, and it's a big mistake to try and mislead people.

For me the true business of photography is to capture a bit of reality (whatever that is) on film...if, later, the reality means something to someone else, so much the better.

No one wants to learn from mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art's aim.

There's a guy in California who was voting 24 years after he died. I mean, so to suggest to us that people who are concerned about honest elections are somehow nutty, I think, is a mistake.

The beautiful, which is perhaps inseparable from art, is not after all tied to the subject, but to the pictorial representation. In this way and in no other does art overcome the ugly without avoiding it.