Motivational Quotes

Art

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

- Ben Shahn

Best Quotes about Art

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

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

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Edmond de Goncourt

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

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

Howe, Nathaniel

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

10.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

11.

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

Duke Ellington

12.

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

13.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

22.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

23.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

24.

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.

25.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

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

27.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

28.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

29.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

30.

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

31.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

33.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

34.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

35.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

36.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

37.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

38.

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

Melville, Herman

39.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

40.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

41.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

42.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

43.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

44.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

45.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

46.

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

47.

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

48.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

49.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

50.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius