Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

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

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

10.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

11.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

12.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

13.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

14.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

15.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

16.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

18.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

19.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

20.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

21.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

22.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

23.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

24.

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

Warhol, Andy

25.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

26.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

27.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

28.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

29.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

30.

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

31.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

32.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

33.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

34.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

35.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

36.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

37.

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

David Cronenberg

38.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

39.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

40.

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

41.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

42.

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

43.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

44.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

45.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

46.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

47.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

48.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

49.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

50.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De