Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

- Paul Gauguin

Best Quotes about Art

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

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

Thurber, James

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

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

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

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.

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

10.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

11.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

12.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

13.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

14.

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

15.

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

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

17.

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

18.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

19.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

20.

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

Keller, Helen

21.

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

22.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

23.

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

24.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

25.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Cassady, Neal

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.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

31.

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

Bellow, Saul

32.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

33.

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

34.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

35.

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

Sand, George

36.

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

Bible

37.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

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

Pablo Picasso

39.

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

40.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

41.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

42.

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

43.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

44.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

45.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

46.

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

Piero Milani

47.

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

48.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

49.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

50.

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