Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- David Cronenberg

Best Quotes about Art

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

Brancusi, Constantin

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

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

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

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

10.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

11.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

13.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

14.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

15.

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

16.

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

17.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

18.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

19.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

20.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

21.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

22.

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

23.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

24.

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

25.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

26.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

27.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

28.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

29.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

30.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

31.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

32.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

33.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

34.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

35.

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

Connolly, Cyril

36.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

37.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

38.

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

39.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

44.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

45.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

46.

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

Al Capp

47.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

48.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

49.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.