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

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

Shakespeare, William

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

Brown, John Mason

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

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

Truman, Harry S

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

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

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

Edmond de Goncourt

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

10.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

11.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

12.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

13.

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

14.

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

Riding, Laura

15.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

16.

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

17.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

18.

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

Capp, Al

19.

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

20.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

21.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

22.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

23.

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.

24.

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

25.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

26.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

27.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

28.

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

29.

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

30.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

31.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

32.

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

Piero Milani

33.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

34.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

35.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

36.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

37.

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

38.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

39.

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

John F. Kennedy

40.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

41.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

42.

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

43.

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

Thurber, James

44.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

45.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

46.

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

47.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

48.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

49.

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

G. K. Chesterton

50.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.