Advertising is a form of love overwhelmingly reserved for those wealthy potentates of Modern Life—nappies, cereal bars, conditioners, hand sanitizers, and family sedans.

We trust in the value of objects more than ideas or feelings.

Advertising is an enormously skilled inventive force dedicated to nudging us toward heightened appreciation of certain aspects of the world, using wordsmiths and image makers of near genius to create deeply inspiring and beguiling associations.

This selective focus of advertising has a habit of skewing our sense of priorities.

We lose sight of the value of almost everything that's readily to hand and we're deeply ungrateful towards anything that's free or doesn't cost very much.

In the early 21st century, English artist David Hockney ran a major advertising campaign for trees.

In a psychological field, French painter Pierre Bonard carried out an exceptionally successful campaign for tenderness by turning out hundreds of images of his partner Marthe viewed through lenses of sympathy, concern, and understanding.

It is the power of art to honor the elusive but real value of ordinary life.

Only a very few sorts of things ever get advertised; almost nothing in the world is in a position to afford the budgets required by an advertising campaign.

American painter Mary Cassatt made a pretty good case for the world-beating importance of spending some time with a child.

Advertising is the most compelling agent of mass appreciation that we have ever known because it is so ubiquitous.

One of our major flaws as animals is that we're very bad at keeping in mind the real ingredients of happiness.

Art functions by running advertising campaigns not for anything expensive or usually even available for purchase, but for the many things that are at once of huge human importance and yet constantly in danger of being forgotten.

In Chardin's painting of women taking tea, the sitter's dress might be a bit more elaborate than is normal today, but the painted table, teapot, chair, spoon, and cup could all be picked up at a flea market, and the room is studiously plain, yet the picture is glamorous.

Chardin's painting makes the ordinary occasion and simple furnishings seductive and invites the beholder to go home and create their own live version.

In the 1830s, Danish artist Christin Koepka did a lot of advertising for the sky, especially just before or after a rain shower.

Art may teach us to be more just towards ourselves as we endeavor to make the best of our humble circumstances—a job we don't always love—dealing with the imperfections of age, frustrated ambitions, and attempts to stay loyal to some irritable families.

Art can do the opposite of glamorize the unattainable; it can reawaken us to the genuine merit of life as we're forced to lead it.

Art is advertising for the things we really need.

At the start of the 16th century, German painter Albrecht Dürer launched a comparable campaign around the value of grass.