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

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

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

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

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

Riding, Laura

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

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

Bible

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

10.

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

11.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

12.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

13.

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

14.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

15.

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.

16.

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

Shakespeare, William

17.

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

18.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

19.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

20.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

21.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

22.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

23.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

24.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

25.

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

26.

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

Driscoll, Louise

27.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

28.

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

Pascal, Blaise

29.

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

Woodberry, George E.

30.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

31.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

32.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

33.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

34.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

35.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

36.

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

37.

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

38.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

39.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

40.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

41.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

42.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

43.

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

44.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

45.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

46.

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

Isak Dineson

47.

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

48.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

49.

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

50.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.