Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

- Alfred North Whitehead

Best Quotes about Art

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

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

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

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

Chopra, Deepak

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

10.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

11.

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

12.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

17.

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

18.

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

Brown, John Mason

19.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

20.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

21.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

22.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

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

24.

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

25.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

26.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

27.

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

28.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

29.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

30.

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

31.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

32.

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

George Tooker

33.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

34.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

35.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

36.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

37.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

38.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

39.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

40.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

41.

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

42.

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

43.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

44.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

45.

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

Piero Milani

46.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

47.

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

48.

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

49.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

50.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.