Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Ionesco, Eugene

Best Quotes about Art

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

Henry Ward Beecher

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

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

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

Mann, Horace

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Alfred North Whitehead

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

10.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

11.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

12.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

13.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

14.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

20.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

21.

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

22.

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

23.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

24.

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

Picasso, Pablo

25.

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

26.

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

Yu Cao

27.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

28.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

29.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

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

31.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

32.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

33.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

34.

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

35.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

36.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

37.

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

38.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

39.

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

John F. Kennedy

40.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

41.

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.

42.

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

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.

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

Piero Milani

45.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

46.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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

50.

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