Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Art

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

10.

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

Klee, Paul

11.

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

12.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

15.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

16.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

17.

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

18.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

19.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

20.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

21.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

22.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

23.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

24.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

25.

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

G. K. Chesterton

26.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

27.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

28.

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

29.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

30.

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

31.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

32.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

33.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

34.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

35.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

36.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

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

38.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

39.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

40.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

41.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

42.

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

43.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

44.

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

45.

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

Riding, Laura

46.

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

47.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

48.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett