Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

- Paul Gauguin

Best Quotes about Art

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

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

I will greet this day with love in my heart. For this is the greatest secret of success in all ventures. Muscles can split a shield and even destroy life itself but only the unseen power of love can open the hearts of man. And until I master this act I will remain no more than a peddler in the marketplace. I will make love my greatest weapon and none on who I call can defend upon its force... my love will melt all hearts liken to the sun whose rays soften the coldest day.

Mandino, Og

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

10.

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

Shakespeare, William

11.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

12.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

13.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

14.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

15.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

16.

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

Burroughs, William S.

17.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

18.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

22.

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

23.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

24.

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

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.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

27.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

28.

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

29.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

30.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

31.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

32.

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

Murdoch, Iris

33.

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

34.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

35.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

36.

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.

37.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

38.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

39.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

40.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

41.

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

42.

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

Woodberry, George E.

43.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

44.

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

Gutzkow

45.

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

46.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

47.

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

Al Capp

48.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

49.

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

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