Motivational Quotes

Art

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

- Maistre, Joseph De

Best Quotes about Art

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

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

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

G. K. Chesterton

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

10.

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

11.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

12.

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

13.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

14.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

15.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

16.

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

17.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

19.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

20.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

21.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

22.

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

23.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

24.

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

25.

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

26.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

27.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

28.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

29.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

30.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

31.

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

Eliot, T. S.

32.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

33.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

34.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

35.

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

36.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

37.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

38.

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

Pablo Picasso

39.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

40.

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

Proverb, Chinese

41.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

42.

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

43.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

44.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

45.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

46.

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

47.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

49.

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

Peri, Gabriel

50.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward