Motivational Quotes

Art

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Art

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

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

David Cronenberg

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

Woodberry, George E.

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

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.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

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

10.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

11.

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

12.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

13.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

14.

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

15.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

16.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

17.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

18.

Love can heal a broken heart.

19.

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

20.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

21.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

22.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

23.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

24.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

25.

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

26.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

27.

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

28.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

29.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

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

Piet Mondrian

31.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

32.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

33.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

34.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

35.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

36.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

37.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

38.

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

Wilson, Robert

39.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

40.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

41.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

42.

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

Duke Ellington

43.

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

44.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

45.

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.

46.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

47.

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

48.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

49.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

50.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul