Motivational Quotes

Art

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

- Picasso, Pablo

Best Quotes about Art

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

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

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

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

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

10.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

11.

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

M. C. Richards

12.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

13.

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

14.

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

15.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

16.

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

17.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

18.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

19.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

20.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

21.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

22.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

23.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

24.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

25.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

26.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

27.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

28.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

29.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

30.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

31.

Love can heal a broken heart.

32.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

33.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

34.

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

Mailer, Norman

35.

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

36.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

37.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

38.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

39.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

40.

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

Wilson, Robert

41.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

42.

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

43.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

44.

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

David Cronenberg

45.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

46.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

47.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

48.

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

49.

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

50.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre