Motivational Quotes

Art

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

- Blair, Hugh

Best Quotes about Art

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

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

Isak Dineson

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

David Cronenberg

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

Paz, Octavio

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.

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

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

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

10.

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

Ben Shahn

11.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

12.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

13.

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

14.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

15.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

16.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

17.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

18.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

19.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

20.

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

21.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

22.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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

Berle, Adolf

26.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

27.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

28.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

29.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

30.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

31.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

32.

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

West, Rebecca

33.

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

Truman, Harry S

34.

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

Yu Cao

35.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

36.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

37.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

39.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

40.

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

Conrad, Joseph

41.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

42.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

43.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

44.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

45.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

46.

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

Kennedy, John F.

47.

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

Murdoch, Iris

48.

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.

49.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

50.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster