Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Pascal, Blaise

Best Quotes about Art

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

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

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

Cassady, Neal

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

10.

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

11.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

12.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

13.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

14.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

15.

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

16.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

17.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

18.

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

19.

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

Bible

20.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

21.

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

22.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

23.

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

24.

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

25.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

26.

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

Parker, Dorothy

27.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

28.

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

Bellow, Saul

29.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

30.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

31.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

32.

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

33.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

34.

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

35.

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

Schnitzler, Arthur

36.

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

Riding, Laura

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.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

39.

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

Kooning, Willem De

40.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

41.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

43.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

44.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

45.

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

46.

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

Simonides

47.

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

Gide, Andre

48.

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

49.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

50.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg