Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Shakespeare, William

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Parker, Dorothy

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

Cather, Willa

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

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

Piet Mondrian

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

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

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

10.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

11.

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

12.

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

G. K. Chesterton

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

16.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

17.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

18.

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

Duke Ellington

19.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

20.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

21.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

22.

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

23.

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

Updike, John

24.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

25.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

26.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

27.

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

28.

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

Zola, Emile

29.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

30.

Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors.

Picasso, Pablo

31.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

32.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

33.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

34.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

35.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

36.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

37.

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

38.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

39.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

40.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

41.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

42.

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

Yu Cao

43.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

44.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

45.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

46.

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

Morris, William

47.

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

48.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

49.

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

50.

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

Kempis, Thomas