Motivational Quotes

Art

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

- E. M. Forster

Best Quotes about Art

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

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

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

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

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

10.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

11.

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.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

15.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

16.

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

17.

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

Wilson, Robert

18.

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

19.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

20.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

21.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

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

Edith Wharton

24.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

25.

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

Weil, Simone

26.

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

David Cronenberg

27.

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

Duke Ellington

28.

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

Mann, Horace

29.

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

Einstein, Albert

30.

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

31.

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

32.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

33.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

34.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

35.

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

36.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

37.

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

Churchill, Winston

38.

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

Eliot, T. S.

39.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

40.

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

41.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

42.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

43.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

44.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid