Motivational Quotes

Art

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

- Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Best Quotes about Art

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

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

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

Einstein, Albert

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

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.

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

Joyce, James

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

10.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

11.

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

12.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

13.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

20.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

21.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

22.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

23.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

24.

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

John F. Kennedy

25.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

26.

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

Cather, Willa

27.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

28.

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

29.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

30.

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

31.

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

Proust, Marcel

32.

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

Lowell, James Russell

33.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

34.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

35.

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

Conrad, Joseph

36.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

37.

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

38.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

39.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

40.

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

Riding, Laura

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

44.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

45.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

46.

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

Murdoch, Iris

47.

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

Ambrose Bierce

48.

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

Proverb, Chinese

49.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

50.

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