Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

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

Al Capp

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

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

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

10.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

11.

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

12.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

13.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

14.

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

Berle, Adolf

15.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

16.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

17.

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

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.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

20.

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

21.

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

Frye, Northrop

22.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

23.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

24.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

25.

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

Shakespeare, William

26.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

27.

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

28.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

29.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

30.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

31.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

32.

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

Brown, John Mason

33.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

34.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

35.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

36.

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

37.

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

Ben Shahn

38.

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

39.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

40.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

41.

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

G. K. Chesterton

42.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

43.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

44.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

45.

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

46.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

47.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

48.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

49.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

50.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.