Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Holyfield, Evander

Best Quotes about Art

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

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.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

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

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

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

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

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

Joyce, James

10.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

11.

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

12.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

13.

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

Keller, Helen

14.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

15.

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

16.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

17.

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

G. K. Chesterton

18.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

19.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

20.

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

George Tooker

21.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

22.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

23.

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

Ambrose Bierce

24.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

25.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

27.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

28.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

29.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

30.

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

Schumann, Robert

31.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

32.

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)

33.

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

Melville, Herman

34.

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

Paz, Octavio

35.

Of all the arts in which the wise excel, nature's chief masterpiece is writing well.

Buckingham, Duke of

36.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

37.

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

38.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

39.

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

Camus, Albert

40.

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

Anderson, Judith

41.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

42.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

43.

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

44.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

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.

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

47.

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

48.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

49.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

50.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De