Motivational Quotes

Art

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

- Brancusi, Constantin

Best Quotes about Art

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

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

Paz, Octavio

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

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

10.

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.

11.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

12.

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

13.

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

David Cronenberg

14.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

19.

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

Wilson, Robert

20.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

21.

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

22.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

24.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

25.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

26.

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

Ben Shahn

27.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

28.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

29.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

30.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

31.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

32.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

33.

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

Wordsworth, William

34.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

35.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

36.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

37.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

38.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

39.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

40.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

41.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Ambrose Bierce

45.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

46.

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

47.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

48.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

49.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

50.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles