Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

Best Quotes about Art

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

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

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

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

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

Camus, Albert

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

10.

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

11.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

12.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

13.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

14.

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.

15.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

16.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

17.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

18.

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

19.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

20.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

21.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

22.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

23.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

24.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

25.

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

26.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

27.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

29.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

30.

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

31.

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

Midler, Bette

32.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

33.

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

34.

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

35.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

36.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

37.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

38.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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.

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

41.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

42.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

43.

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

44.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

45.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

46.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

47.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

48.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

49.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

50.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward