Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

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

Bangs, Lester

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

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

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

Updike, John

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

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 teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

10.

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

11.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

12.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

13.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

14.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

15.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

16.

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

Arp, Jean

17.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

18.

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

19.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

20.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

21.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

22.

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

23.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

24.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

25.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

26.

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

27.

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

Yu Cao

28.

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

29.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

30.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

31.

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

32.

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

Proverb

33.

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

34.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

35.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

36.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

37.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

38.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

39.

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

40.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

41.

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

42.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

46.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

47.

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

Ambrose Bierce

48.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

49.

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

Isak Dineson

50.

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