Motivational Quotes

Art

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

- Farnham, Eliza

Best Quotes about Art

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

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

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

10.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

11.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

12.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

13.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

14.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

15.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

16.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

17.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

18.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

19.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

20.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

21.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

22.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

23.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

24.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

25.

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

26.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

27.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

28.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

29.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

30.

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

31.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

32.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

33.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

34.

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

35.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

37.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

38.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

39.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

40.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

41.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

42.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

43.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

44.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

45.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

46.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

47.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

48.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

49.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

50.

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