Motivational Quotes

Art

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

- Huxley, Aldous

Best Quotes about Art

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

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

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

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

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

David Cronenberg

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

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

10.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

11.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

12.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

13.

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

14.

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

Proust, Marcel

15.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

16.

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

Melville, Herman

17.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

18.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

19.

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

20.

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

21.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

22.

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

23.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

24.

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

Andre Gide

25.

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

26.

Huxley, Aldous

27.

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

Frost, Robert

28.

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

Bible

29.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

30.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

31.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

32.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

33.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

34.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

35.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

36.

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

37.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

38.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

39.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

40.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

41.

Love can heal a broken heart.

42.

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

43.

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.

44.

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

45.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

46.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

47.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

48.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

49.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

50.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail