Art is man's constant effort to create for himself a different order of reality from that which is given to him.

Chinua Achebe

The events of human life, whether public or private, are so intimately linked to architecture that most observers can reconstruct nations or individuals in all the truth of their habits from the remains of their monuments or from their domestic relics.

Honore de Balbac

All artforms are in the service of the greatest of all arts: the art of living.

Bertolt Brecht

Art's whatever you choose to frame. 

Fleur Adcock

Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.

Theodor W. Adorno

'I don't know anything about art, but I know what I like,' really means, 'I don't know anything about art, but I like what I know.'

Anonymous

- corrupted from Max Beerbohm . . .

Art is an international language, understood by all. 

Igor Babailov

Architecture is really about well-being. I think that people want to feel good in a space... On the one hand it's about shelter, but it's also about pleasure.

Zaha Hadid

Art is a profound intellectual stimulation.

K. A. Bressler

Art should be an oasis: a place or refuge from the hardness of life.

Fernando Botero

Whether something is called art is beside the point. What counts is what happens when you ask it to actually be art.

Darby Bannard

Art is a guaranty of sanity. That is the most important thing I have said. 

Louise Bourgeois

Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole. 

Maya Lin

The creative relationship with basic human archetypes can be communicated through art to human perception. 

Kristi Bridgeman

You see, painting has now become, or all art has now become completely a game, by which man distracts himself. What is fascinating actually is, that it's going to become much more difficult for the artist, because he must really deepen the game to become any good at all. 

Francis Bacon

Even Picasso at his most bizarre was bound by a kind of formal architecture within the frame. Of course it's one thing to know what you're looking for, it's another to find it.

Ken Mosby

Architecture is inhabited sculpture.

Constantin Brancusi

Art is not 'about.' Art is.

Darby Bannard

Art! Who comprehends her? With whom can one consult concerning this great goddess? 

Ludwig van Beethoven

Art is a real thing. Art is the soul of the whisper of the cloud on the horizon.

William Brown

Paintings must be understood through the eyes, and that's not the word either. No writing, no talking, no singing, no dancing will explain them. They are the final, the nth whoopee of sight.

Charles Demuth

Art is frozen zen.

Reginald H. Blyth

It is essential that the painter should develop not only his eyes, but also his soul, so that it too may be capable of weighing colors in balance . . .

Wassily Kandinsky

Art condenses the experience we all have as human beings, and, by forming it, makes it significant. We all have an in-built need for harmony and the structures that create harmony. Basically, art is an affirmation of life.

Trevor Bell

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

W. H. Auden

We are rapidly approaching the point where everything is art and, therefore, nothing is art. 

Margo Buccini

Art is the effort of man to express the ideas which nature suggests to him of a power above nature, whether that power be within the recesses of his own being, or in the Great First Cause of which nature, like himself, is but the effect.

Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton

As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder.

Leonard Cohen

I believe that all centers that appear in space - whether they originate in biology, in physical forces, in pure geometry, in color - are alike simply in that they all animate space.

 Christopher Alexander

A spiritual search in art is looking for meaning outside of yourself.

Ross Bleckner

The ideal space must contain elements of magic, serenity, sorcery and mystery.

Luis Barragan

We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.

Winston Churchill

All architecture, which does not express serenity, fails in its spiritual mission. Thus, it has been a mistake to abandon the shelter of walls for the inclemency of large areas of glass. 

Luis Barragan

Through the years, a man peoples space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.

Gorge Luis Borges

Architecture is not like physics or mathematics. Even though it uses technology and engineering, it's an art. And because we live in buildings, work in buildings, even celebrate the spirit in buildings, architecture is a very human pursuit. It's in the humanities. 

Jim Spear

Color provokes a psychic vibration. Color hides a power still unknown but real, which acts on every part of the human body. 

Wassily Kandinsky

If you consider only utility, the things you build will soon be useless... nobody wants to be in it.

Roger Scruton

Architecture is made of memory. The slope of a roof, the shape of a window, and the color of a door contain the record of the minds that conceived them and the hands that crafted them. 

Anthony Lawlor

It is therefore indisputable that the limbs of architecture are derived from the limbs of man. 

Michelangelo

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

Frank Gehry

Shape your space.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Always design a thing by considering its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

Eliel Saarinen

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.

T. S. Eliot

Ah, to build, to build! That is the noblest art of all the arts. Painting and sculpture are but images, are merely shadows cast by outward things on stone or canvas, having in themselves no separate existence. Architecture, existing in itself, and not in seeming a something it is not, surpasses them as substance shadow.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Form ever follows function.

Louis H. Sullivan

We affirm depth as the only pictorial and plastic form of space. 

Naum Gabo

Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

The search for the spirit... insists on the collaboration of the different basins of knowledge found in the diverse cultures our world has manufactured.

Carlos Rodriguez Amadeo

Each moment of the creative process engages the senses more fully, with richer and more focused awareness. In art practice we can become transcendence, one with all beings and our world.  

Dianne Bersea

I cannot express it: but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should be, an existence of yours beyond you.

Emily Bronte

Perspective is to painting what the bridle is to the horse, the rudder to a ship.

Leonardo da Vinci

Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.

Samuel Johnson

To increase the illusion of depth in your landscape... keep your active lines up front and slow the linear quality down in the distance.

Tony van Hasselt

Architecture in general is frozen music.

Friedrich von Schelling

Creativity is the voice of the spirit. One's art should be the extension of oneself. 

Maritza Burgos

Architecture is the triumph of human imagination over materials, methods, and men, to put man into possession of his own Earth. It is at least the geometric pattern of things, of life, of the human and social world. It is at best that magic framework of reality that we sometimes touch upon when we use the word order. 

Frank Lloyd Wright