Motivational Quotes

Art

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

- Novalis

Best Quotes about Art

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

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

Miguel de Cervantes

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

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

Bangs, Lester

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

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

Joyce, James

11.

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

12.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

13.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

14.

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

15.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

16.

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

17.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

18.

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

Proverb, Chinese

19.

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

20.

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

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.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

23.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

24.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

25.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

26.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

27.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

28.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

29.

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

Isak Dineson

30.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

31.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

32.

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

33.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

34.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

35.

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

36.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

37.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

38.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

39.

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

William Baziotes

40.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

41.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

42.

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

43.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

44.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

45.

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

46.

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

Bellow, Saul

47.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

48.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

49.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

50.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo