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

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Kennedy, John F.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

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

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

Truman, Harry S

10.

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

Gill, Eric

11.

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

12.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

13.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

14.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

15.

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

Frye, Northrop

16.

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

17.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

18.

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

19.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

20.

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

21.

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

Parker, Dorothy

22.

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

Ruskin, John

23.

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

Joyce, James

24.

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

25.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

26.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

27.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

28.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

29.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

30.

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

31.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

32.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

33.

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

34.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

35.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

36.

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

Morris, William

37.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

38.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

39.

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

40.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

41.

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

42.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

43.

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

44.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

45.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

46.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

47.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

49.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

50.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis