Motivational Quotes

Art

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

- Fischer, Ernst

Best Quotes about Art

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

Cather, Willa

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

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

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

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

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

10.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

11.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

12.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

13.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

14.

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

Anderson, Bill

15.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

16.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

17.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

18.

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

Anderson, Judith

19.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

20.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

21.

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

Klee, Paul

22.

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

Ciardi, John

23.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

24.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

25.

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.

26.

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

Wordsworth, William

27.

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

Piero Milani

28.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

29.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

30.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

31.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

32.

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

John F. Kennedy

33.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

34.

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

Proverb

35.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

36.

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

Riding, Laura

37.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

39.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

40.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

41.

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

42.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

43.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

44.

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

45.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

46.

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

47.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

49.

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

Duke Ellington

50.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.