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

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

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

Proverb, Chinese

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

10.

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

11.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

12.

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

13.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

14.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

15.

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

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

20.

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

Camus, Albert

21.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

22.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

23.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

24.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

25.

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

26.

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

27.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

28.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

29.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

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.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

32.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

33.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

34.

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

Holyfield, Evander

35.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

36.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

37.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

39.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

40.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

41.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

42.

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

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.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

45.

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

46.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

47.

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

Paz, Octavio

48.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

49.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.