Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

Love can heal a broken heart.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

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

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

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

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

Mann, Horace

10.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

11.

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

12.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

13.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

14.

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

15.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

16.

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

Moses, Grandma

17.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

18.

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

19.

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.

20.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

21.

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

22.

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

23.

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

24.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

25.

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

Klee, Paul

26.

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

27.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

28.

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

Driscoll, Louise

29.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

30.

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

31.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

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.

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

34.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

35.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

39.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

40.

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

41.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

42.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

43.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

44.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

45.

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

46.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

47.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

48.

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

Novalis

49.

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