Motivational Quotes

Art

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

- Aristophanes

Best Quotes about Art

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

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

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

Cassady, Neal

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

Proverb, Chinese

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

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

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

Proust, Marcel

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

10.

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

11.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

12.

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

Connolly, Cyril

13.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

14.

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

G. K. Chesterton

15.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

16.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

17.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

21.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

22.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

23.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

24.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

25.

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

26.

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

Proverb

27.

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

28.

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

29.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

30.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

31.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

32.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

33.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

34.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

35.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

36.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

37.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

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

39.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

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.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

42.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

43.

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

Brown, John Mason

44.

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

Eliot, T. S.

45.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

46.

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

47.

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

48.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

49.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

50.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas