Motivational Quotes

Art

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

- Ionesco, Eugene

Best Quotes about Art

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

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

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.

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

Connolly, Cyril

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

10.

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

Riding, Laura

11.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

12.

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

13.

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

14.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

15.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

16.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

17.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

18.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

19.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

20.

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

21.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

22.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

23.

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

Joyce, James

24.

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

25.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

29.

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

30.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

31.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

32.

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

Isak Dineson

33.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

34.

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

Picasso, Pablo

35.

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

Camus, Albert

36.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

37.

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

38.

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

Weil, Simone

39.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

40.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

41.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

42.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

43.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

44.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

45.

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

George Tooker

46.

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

47.

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

48.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

49.

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

Varese, Edward

50.

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall