Motivational Quotes

Art

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

- Paglia, Camille

Best Quotes about 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

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

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

Blackie, Professor

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

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Riding, Laura

10.

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

Simonides

11.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

12.

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

13.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

G. K. Chesterton

15.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

16.

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

17.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

18.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

19.

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

20.

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

21.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

22.

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

Picasso, Pablo

23.

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

Ciardi, John

24.

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

25.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

26.

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

27.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

28.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

29.

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

30.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

31.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

32.

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

Motherwell, Robert

33.

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

William Baziotes

34.

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

35.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

36.

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

Jacob, Max

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

40.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

41.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

42.

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

43.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

44.

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.

45.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

46.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

47.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

48.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]