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

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

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

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

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

Yu Cao

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

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

Gutzkow

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

Dubuffet, Jean

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

10.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

11.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

12.

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

Shakespeare, William

13.

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

14.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

16.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

17.

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

18.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

19.

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

20.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

21.

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

22.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

23.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

28.

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

Truman, Harry S

29.

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

Al Capp

30.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

31.

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

32.

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

33.

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

34.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

35.

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

Anderson, Judith

36.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

37.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

38.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

39.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

40.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

41.

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

42.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

43.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

44.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

45.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

46.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

47.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

48.

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

49.

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

50.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn