Motivational Quotes

Art

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

- Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Best Quotes about Art

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

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

Camus, Albert

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

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

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

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

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

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

10.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

11.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

12.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

13.

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

Wilson, Robert

14.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

15.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

19.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

20.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

21.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

22.

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

23.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

24.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

25.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

26.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

27.

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

28.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

29.

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

Motherwell, Robert

30.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

31.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

32.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

33.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

34.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

35.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

36.

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

David Cronenberg

37.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

38.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

43.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

44.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

45.

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.

46.

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

Cioran, E. M.

47.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

48.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

49.

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

50.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter