Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Edmond de Goncourt

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

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

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

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

Frost, Robert

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

Connolly, Cyril

10.

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

11.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

12.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

13.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

14.

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

15.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

16.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

17.

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

Isak Dineson

18.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

19.

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

20.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

21.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

22.

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

David Cronenberg

23.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

24.

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

25.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Proverb, Chinese

29.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

30.

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

31.

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.

32.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

33.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

34.

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

35.

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

36.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

37.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

38.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

39.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

40.

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

41.

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.

42.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

43.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

44.

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

45.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

47.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

48.

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

Ben Shahn

49.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

50.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir