Motivational Quotes

Art

What is art but a way of seeing?

- Berger, Thomas

Best Quotes about Art

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

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

Wilson, Robert

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

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

10.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

11.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

15.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

16.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

17.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

18.

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

Ovid

19.

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

20.

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

Ambrose Bierce

21.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

22.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

23.

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

24.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

25.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

26.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

27.

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

28.

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

Ben Shahn

29.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

30.

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

31.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

32.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

33.

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

Bible

34.

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

Paz, Octavio

35.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

36.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

37.

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

38.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

39.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

40.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

41.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

42.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

43.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

44.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

45.

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

46.

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

47.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

48.

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

49.

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

G. K. Chesterton

50.

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