Motivational Quotes

Art

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

- Mencken, H. L.

Best Quotes about Art

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

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

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

Ben Shahn

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

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

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

10.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

11.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

12.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

13.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

14.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

15.

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

George Tooker

16.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

17.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

19.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

20.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

21.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

22.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

23.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

24.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

25.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

26.

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

Burroughs, William S.

27.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

28.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

29.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

30.

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

31.

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

Morris, William

32.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

33.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

34.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

35.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

36.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

37.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

38.

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

39.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

40.

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

Bellow, Saul

41.

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

Sand, George

42.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

43.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

44.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

45.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

46.

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

47.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

48.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

49.

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

Frost, Robert

50.

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

Joyce, James