Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

- Dubuffet, Jean

Best Quotes about Art

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

Edith Wharton

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

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

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

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

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

Driscoll, Louise

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

10.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

11.

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

Ambrose Bierce

12.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

13.

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

Frye, Northrop

14.

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

15.

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

Ruskin, John

16.

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

17.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

18.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

19.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

20.

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

Eliot, T. S.

21.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

22.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

23.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

24.

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

25.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

26.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

27.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

28.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

29.

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

30.

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

David Cronenberg

31.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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.

35.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

36.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

37.

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

38.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

39.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

40.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

41.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

42.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

43.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

44.

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

Thurber, James

45.

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

46.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

47.

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

Lowell, James Russell

48.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

49.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

50.

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

Brown, John Mason