Motivational Quotes

Art

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

- Breton, Andre

Best Quotes about Art

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

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

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

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.

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

Simonides

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

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

Kennedy, John F.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

10.

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

Weil, Simone

11.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

12.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

14.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

15.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

16.

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

Riding, Laura

17.

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

18.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

19.

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

20.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

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

22.

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.

23.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

24.

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

25.

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

26.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

27.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

28.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

29.

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

Brown, John Mason

30.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

31.

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

32.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

33.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

34.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

35.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

36.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

37.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

38.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

39.

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

40.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

41.

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

Berle, Adolf

42.

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.

43.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

44.

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

45.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

46.

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

47.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

48.

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