Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

10.

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

11.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

12.

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

13.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

14.

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

Motherwell, Robert

15.

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.

16.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

17.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

18.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

20.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

21.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

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

23.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

24.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

25.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

26.

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

Schumann, Robert

27.

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.

28.

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

29.

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

Sand, George

30.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

31.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

33.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

34.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

35.

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

Joyce, James

36.

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

37.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

38.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

39.

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

Ambrose Bierce

40.

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

41.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

42.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

43.

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

44.

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

Kempis, Thomas

45.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

46.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

47.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

48.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

49.

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