Motivational Quotes

Art

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

David Cronenberg

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

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

Rosenberg, Harold

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

Piet Mondrian

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

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

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

Ginsberg, Allen

10.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

11.

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

Ambrose Bierce

12.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

13.

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

14.

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

Anderson, Judith

15.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

16.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

17.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

18.

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

19.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

20.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

21.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

22.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

23.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

24.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

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.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

27.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

28.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

29.

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

30.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

31.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

32.

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

Pablo Picasso

33.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

34.

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

35.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

36.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

37.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

38.

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

Ben Shahn

39.

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

Frye, Northrop

40.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

41.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

42.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

43.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

44.

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

Frost, Robert

45.

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

46.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

47.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

48.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

49.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

50.

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