Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Eliot, T. S.

Best Quotes about Art

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

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

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

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

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

Shakespeare, William

10.

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

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.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

13.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

14.

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

Jackson Pollock

15.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

16.

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

17.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

18.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

19.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

20.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

21.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

22.

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

Kael, Pauline

23.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

24.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

25.

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

26.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

27.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

28.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

29.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

30.

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

31.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

32.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

33.

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.

34.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

35.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

36.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

37.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

38.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

39.

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

40.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

41.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

42.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

43.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

44.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

45.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

46.

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

David Cronenberg

47.

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.

48.

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.

49.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

50.

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