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

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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

Shakespeare, William

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

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

Cather, Willa

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

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

Proverb, Chinese

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

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

10.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

11.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

12.

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

Isak Dineson

13.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

14.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

15.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

16.

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

17.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

18.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

19.

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

William Baziotes

20.

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

21.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

22.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

24.

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

Pascal, Blaise

25.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

26.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

27.

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.

28.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

29.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

30.

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.

31.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

32.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

33.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

34.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

35.

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

36.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

37.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

43.

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

44.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

45.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

46.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

47.

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