Motivational Quotes

Art

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

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

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

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

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

Arp, Jean

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

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

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

Ambrose Bierce

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

Parker, Theodore

10.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

11.

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

Updike, John

12.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

13.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

14.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

15.

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

Wilson, Robert

16.

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

Pablo Picasso

17.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

18.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

19.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

20.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

21.

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

David Cronenberg

22.

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

23.

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

24.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

25.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

26.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

27.

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

28.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

29.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

30.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

31.

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

32.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

33.

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

34.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

35.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

36.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

37.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

38.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

39.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

41.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

42.

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

43.

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

44.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

45.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

46.

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

47.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

48.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

49.

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

Murdoch, Iris

50.

The heart will break, but broken live on.