Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Brancusi, Constantin

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

10.

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

Edith Wharton

11.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

12.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

13.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

14.

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.

15.

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

Mann, Horace

16.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

17.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

18.

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

19.

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

Keller, Helen

20.

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

Weil, Simone

21.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

22.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

23.

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

24.

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

Zola, Emile

25.

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

26.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

27.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

28.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

29.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

30.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

31.

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

Ben Shahn

32.

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

33.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

34.

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

35.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

36.

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

37.

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

Camus, Albert

38.

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

39.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

40.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

41.

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

Shakespeare, William

42.

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

Lowell, James Russell

43.

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

44.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

45.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

46.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

47.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

48.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

49.

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

Woodberry, George E.

50.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca