I agree that Ruskin has done much harm to counter balance much good in giving people the trick of talking about Art instead of really doing a little of it to enable them to understand.
— William H. Hunt
This is the merit and distinction of art: to be more real than reality, to be not nature but nature's essence.
— William Ernest Henley
London, thou art the flower of cities all!
— William Dunbar
Poetry is that art which selects and arranges the symbols of thought in such a manner as to excite the imagination the most powerfully and delightfully.
— William Cullen Bryant
I think you can leave the arts, superior or inferior, to the conscience of mankind.
— William Butler Yeats
He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars: general Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars.
— William Blake
Now being in such grace and favor by reason I learned him some points of geometry and understanding of the art of mathematics with other things, I pleased him so that what I said he would not contrary.
— William Adams
An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.
— Willem de Kooning
What was any art but a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining elusive element which is life itself - life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.
— Willa Cather
Country music, the music of the white rural working class, has often been mocked by elitists whose understanding of power and art was shaped at expensive private schools.
— Will Shetterly
Advertising is the art of convincing people to spend money they don't have for something they don't need.
— Will Rogers
I'm a planner, an organizer. I write things down because you can visually check them off and see progress. Writing things down is a lost art. I've got sticky notes all over my apartment.
— Will Grier
To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.
— Will Durant
I want people to understand and embrace that the art that inspires our technological dreams is just as important as the tech it helps us create.
— Wil Wheaton
The art of acting is to be other than what you are.
— Whoopi Goldberg
Well, I'm an artist to the core. And my objective has always been to use my talents and my skills to elevate humanity through my art.
— Wesley Snipes
Sidney Lumet's chief preoccupation wasn't art. It was right and wrong in the American city, nearly always in New York.
— Wesley Morris
It is of no consequence whether a man of genius have learned either art or science before twenty-five: all that is necessary, or even desirable, is that his powers should be unfolded, his emulation roused, and his habits conducted into a right channel.
— William Godwin
I met and became close with John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art. He was incredibly supportive about me working in color.
— William Eggleston
Study what thou art Whereof thou art a part What thou knowest of this art This is really what thou art. All that is without thee also is within.
— William Drummond
You've got to appreciate the things that come from the art of the Negro and from the heart of the man farthest down.
— William Christopher Handy
Art can never exist without naked beauty displayed.
Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death.
Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.
Language is a social art.
— Willard Van Orman Quine
We're pretty insane about art direction.
— Will Speck
Is art influential? It can be - 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' rallied abolitionists, and 'The Jungle' provoked the demand for a safer food industry.
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.
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
Competition is all in numbers; it's a numbers game, but I looked at it like it's a passion, and it's art.
— Will Champlin
Actors have no color. That's the art form.
Climate change is often the first thing I think about it in the morning, and the last thing I think about before I go to bed. It is not something that escapes that my mind, so inevitably, I had to kind of express that existential terror through art and music. My hope is to channel that confusion and energy into something good.
— Weyes Blood
If a woman decides she likes me, it would behoove her to take into consideration that my art has had a strong influence on the type of person I am.
Movies are visual, aural, they involve people, and life, and ideas and art, they are so elastic. They can hold anything, withstand everything, and make you feel anything. Other arts can do that, but movies are the only ones that can incorporate other media into cinema.
I like the idea of people who've had some success in one form secretly wanting to be something else; I have some of that myself. I look for it in other people who've established themselves in some particular art form, and then you find out that they really would like to design running shoes, or edit literary magazines or something.
— William Gibson
Black-and-white photography, which I was doing in the very early days, was essentially called art photography and usually consisted of landscapes by people like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. But photographs by people like Adams didn't interest me.
The birch-bark canoe of the savage seems to me one of the most beautiful and perfect things of the kind constructed by human art.
You must in all Airs follow the strength, spirit, and disposition of the horse, and do nothing against nature; for art is but to set nature in order, and nothing else.
— William Cavendish
The foundation of empire is art and science. Remove them or degrade them, and the empire is no more. Empire follows art and not vice versa as Englishmen suppose.
Advertising is fundamentally persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art.
— William Bernbach
I make pictures and someone comes in and calls it art.
The condition every art requires is, not so much freedom from restriction, as freedom from adulteration and from the intrusion of foreign matter.
When you create art, the world has to wait.
— Will Smith
I guess some fans like art and get it, others are just into the music, don't really turn up and have an opinion. The fans that have shown interest are all with me all the way.
— Will Sergeant
Hip-hop culture is probably one of the most powerful things to come out of America in a long time - everything from the music to the art to the dance to the language.
— will.i.am
Every science begins as philosophy and ends as art.
I don't aim to make art in a vacuum - you want people to like it.
— Will Arnett
I am an artist, art has no color and no sex.
I think art should stand in its own neutral place, because I think that's how reality always is - it's this duality of being both hopeless and also full of hope.
Nudity has never seemed to bother Grace Jones. Her art has thrived, in part, on a physical candor that both shocked people and redrew the boundaries of taste, beauty, and eroticism around her masculinity, ebony skin, and unrelenting intensity.
