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

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

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

Sand, George

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

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

Edmond de Goncourt

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

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

10.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

11.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

12.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

13.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

14.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

15.

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

16.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

17.

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

18.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

19.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

20.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

21.

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

22.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

23.

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

Ruskin, John

24.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

25.

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

26.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

27.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

28.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

29.

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

Cassady, Neal

30.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

31.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

32.

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

Bangs, Lester

33.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

34.

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

35.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

36.

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

37.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

38.

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

39.

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

Murdoch, Iris

40.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

41.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

42.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

43.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

44.

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

45.

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

46.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

47.

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

48.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

49.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

50.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne