Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Art

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

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.

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

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

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

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

Elizabeth Bowen

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

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

Conrad, Joseph

10.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

11.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

12.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

13.

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

Ciardi, John

14.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

15.

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

16.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

17.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

18.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

19.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

20.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

21.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

23.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

24.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

25.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

26.

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

27.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

28.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

29.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

30.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

31.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

32.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

33.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

34.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

35.

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

36.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

37.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

38.

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

Jackson Pollock

39.

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

40.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

41.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

42.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

43.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

44.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

45.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

46.

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

47.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

48.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

49.

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

50.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von