Motivational Quotes

Art

What is art but a way of seeing?

- Berger, Thomas

Best Quotes about Art

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

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

Parker, Dorothy

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

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

Rosenberg, Harold

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Apollinaire, Guillaume

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

West, Rebecca

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

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

10.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

11.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

12.

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

Kennedy, John F.

13.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

14.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

16.

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

17.

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

Andre Gide

18.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

19.

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

Keller, Helen

20.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

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

22.

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

Morris, William

23.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

24.

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

25.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

26.

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

Pablo Picasso

27.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

28.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

29.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

30.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

31.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

32.

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

33.

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

Walt Whitman

34.

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

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

38.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

39.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

40.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

41.

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

Jacob, Max

42.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

43.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.