Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

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

Wilson, Robert

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

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.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

10.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

11.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

12.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

13.

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

14.

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

15.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

16.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

17.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

20.

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

21.

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

G. K. Chesterton

22.

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

23.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

24.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

25.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

26.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

27.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

29.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

30.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

31.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

32.

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

33.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

34.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

35.

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

36.

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

Jeff Melvoin

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.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

39.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

40.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

41.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

42.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

43.

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

44.

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

45.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

46.

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

47.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

48.

Love can heal a broken heart.

49.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

50.

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

Ionesco, Eugene