Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

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

Andre Gide

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

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

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

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

Riding, Laura

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

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

10.

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

Frost, Robert

11.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

12.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

13.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

14.

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

Ben Shahn

15.

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

16.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

17.

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

Schumann, Robert

18.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

19.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

20.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

21.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

22.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

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

Truman, Harry S

24.

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

Cather, Willa

25.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

26.

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

27.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

28.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

29.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

30.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

31.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

32.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

33.

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

David Cronenberg

34.

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

Duke Ellington

35.

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

36.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

37.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

38.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

39.

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

40.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

41.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

42.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

43.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

44.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

45.

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

G. K. Chesterton

46.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

47.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

48.

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

49.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

50.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh