Motivational Quotes

Art

What we play is life.

- Louis Armstrong

Best Quotes about Art

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

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

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

Brancusi, Constantin

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 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.

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

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

Miguel de Cervantes

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

Frost, Robert

Love can heal a broken heart.

10.

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

Brown, John Mason

11.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

12.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

13.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

14.

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

Ambrose Bierce

15.

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

16.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

17.

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

Thurber, James

18.

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

19.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

20.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

21.

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

22.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

23.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

24.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

25.

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

Moses, Grandma

26.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

27.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

28.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

29.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

30.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

31.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

32.

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

33.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

34.

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

Proverb, Chinese

35.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

36.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

37.

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

Ward Jenkins

38.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

39.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

40.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

41.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

42.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

43.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

44.

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

45.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

46.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

47.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

49.

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

50.

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