Motivational Quotes

Art

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

- Buckingham, Duke of

Best Quotes about Art

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

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

Camus, Albert

It is time for us all to stand and cheer for the doer, the achiever -- the one who recognizes the challenges and does something about it.

Lombardi, Vince

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

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

Frye, Northrop

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

10.

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

11.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

12.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Bible

17.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

18.

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

19.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

20.

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

21.

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

Morris, William

22.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

23.

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

Einstein, Albert

24.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

25.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

26.

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

27.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

29.

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.

30.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

31.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

32.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

34.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

35.

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

36.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

37.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

38.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

39.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

40.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

41.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

42.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

43.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

44.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

45.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

46.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

47.

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

48.

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

Proverb, Chinese

49.

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

50.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von