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

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

Ionesco, Eugene

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

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

Gill, Eric

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Ambrose Bierce

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

10.

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

Kooning, Willem De

11.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

12.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

13.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

14.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

15.

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

16.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

17.

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

Piet Mondrian

18.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

19.

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

20.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

21.

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

22.

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

Wilson, Robert

23.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

24.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

25.

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

26.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

27.

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

28.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

29.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

30.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

31.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

32.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

33.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

34.

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

35.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

36.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

37.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

38.

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

Proverb, Chinese

39.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

40.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

48.

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

49.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

50.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.