Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Duke Ellington

Best Quotes about Art

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

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

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

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

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

Anderson, Judith

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

10.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

11.

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

12.

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

13.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

14.

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

15.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

16.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

17.

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

18.

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

Truman, Harry S

19.

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

20.

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

Shakespeare, William

21.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

22.

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

Pascal, Blaise

23.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

24.

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

25.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

Capp, Al

27.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

28.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

29.

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

30.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

31.

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

32.

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.

33.

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

Shakespeare, William

34.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

35.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

36.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

37.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

38.

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

39.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

40.

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

41.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

42.

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

Jackson Pollock

43.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

44.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

45.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

46.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

47.

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

William Baziotes

48.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

49.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

50.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri