Motivational Quotes

Art

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.

Best Quotes about Art

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

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

Frye, Northrop

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

10.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

11.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

12.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

13.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

14.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

15.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

16.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

17.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

18.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

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

20.

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

Al Capp

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

24.

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

Camus, Albert

25.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

26.

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

27.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

28.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

29.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

30.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

31.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

32.

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

Edith Wharton

33.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

34.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

35.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

36.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

37.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

38.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

39.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

40.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

41.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

42.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

43.

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

Keller, Helen

44.

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

45.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

46.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

47.

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.

48.

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

49.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

50.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell