Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Updike, John

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.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

David Cronenberg

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

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

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

10.

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

Piero Milani

11.

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

12.

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

Frye, Northrop

13.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

14.

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

Camus, Albert

15.

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

Ruskin, John

16.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

17.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

18.

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

Ward Jenkins

19.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

20.

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

Brown, John Mason

21.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

22.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

24.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

25.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

26.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

27.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

28.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

29.

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

30.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

31.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

32.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

33.

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

Cather, Willa

34.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

35.

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

Pablo Picasso

36.

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

37.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

38.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

39.

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

40.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

41.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

42.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

43.

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

Ambrose Bierce

44.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

45.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

46.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

47.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

48.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

49.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

50.

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