Motivational Quotes

Art

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

- Bangs, Lester

Best Quotes about Art

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

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

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

Brancusi, Constantin

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

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

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

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

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

10.

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

John F. Kennedy

11.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

12.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

13.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

14.

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

15.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

16.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

17.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

18.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

19.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

20.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

21.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

22.

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

Yu Cao

23.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

24.

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

25.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

29.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

30.

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

Lowell, James Russell

31.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

32.

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

Anderson, Judith

33.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

34.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

35.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

36.

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

37.

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

38.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

39.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

40.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

41.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

42.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

43.

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

44.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

45.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

46.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

47.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

49.

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

50.

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