Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Nietzsche, Friedrich

Best Quotes about Art

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

Barenboim, Daniel

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

Wilson, Robert

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

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

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

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

10.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

11.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

12.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Thurber, James

14.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

15.

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

16.

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

17.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

18.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

19.

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

Morris, William

20.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

21.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

22.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

23.

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

24.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

25.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

26.

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

27.

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

28.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

29.

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

Sand, George

30.

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

31.

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

Duke Ellington

32.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

33.

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

34.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

35.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

36.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

37.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

38.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

39.

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

Mann, Horace

40.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

41.

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

42.

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

43.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

44.

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

Truman, Harry S

45.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

46.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

47.

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

48.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

49.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.