Motivational Quotes

Art

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

- Klee, Paul

Best Quotes about Art

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

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

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

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

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

Bible

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

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

10.

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

11.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

12.

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

Proverb, Chinese

13.

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

Ciardi, John

14.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

15.

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

Woodberry, George E.

16.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

17.

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

18.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

19.

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

20.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

25.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

26.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

27.

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

Driscoll, Louise

28.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

29.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

30.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

31.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

32.

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

33.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

34.

Love can heal a broken heart.

35.

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

36.

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

37.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

38.

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

39.

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.

40.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

41.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

42.

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

43.

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

Buckingham, Duke of

44.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

45.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

46.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

47.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

48.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

49.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

50.

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

Picasso, Pablo