Motivational Quotes

Art

Repetition is the death of art.

- Robin Green

Best Quotes about Art

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

10.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

11.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

12.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

13.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

14.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

15.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

16.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

17.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

18.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

19.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

20.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

21.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

23.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

24.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

25.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

26.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

27.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

28.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

29.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

30.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

31.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

32.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

33.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

34.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

35.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

36.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

37.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

38.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

39.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

40.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

41.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

42.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

43.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

44.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

45.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

46.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

47.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

48.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

49.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

50.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John