Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Capp, Al

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

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

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

Al Capp

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

Brancusi, Constantin

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

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

10.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

11.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

12.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

13.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

14.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

15.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

16.

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

17.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

18.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

19.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

20.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

22.

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

23.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

24.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

25.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

26.

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

Berle, Adolf

27.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

28.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

29.

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

30.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

31.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

32.

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

33.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

34.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

35.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

36.

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

37.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

38.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

39.

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

40.

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

41.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

42.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

43.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

44.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

45.

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

46.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

47.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

48.

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

49.

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

David Cronenberg

50.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman