Motivational Quotes

Art

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

- Chesterton, Gilbert K.

Best Quotes about Art

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

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

Ionesco, Eugene

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

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

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

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

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

10.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

11.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

12.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

13.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

14.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

17.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

18.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

19.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

20.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

21.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

22.

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

Gide, Andre

23.

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

24.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

25.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

26.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

27.

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

28.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

29.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

30.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

31.

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

Wilson, Robert

32.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

33.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

34.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

35.

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

Lowell, James Russell

36.

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

37.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

38.

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

39.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

40.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

41.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

45.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

46.

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

Ambrose Bierce

47.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

48.

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

49.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

50.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath