Motivational Quotes

Art

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

- Nickolas Muray

Best Quotes about Art

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.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

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

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.

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.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

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

G. K. Chesterton

10.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

11.

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

12.

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

Mann, Horace

13.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

14.

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

15.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

16.

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

Edith Wharton

17.

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

18.

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

Eliot, T. S.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

22.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

23.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

24.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

29.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

30.

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

Klee, Paul

31.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

32.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

33.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

34.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

35.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

36.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

37.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

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.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

40.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

41.

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

Yu Cao

42.

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

43.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

44.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

45.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

46.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

47.

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

48.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

49.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo