Motivational Quotes

Art

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

- Proust, Marcel

Best Quotes about Art

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

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

Howe, Nathaniel

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

Brancusi, Constantin

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

10.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

11.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

12.

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

13.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

14.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

15.

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

Al Capp

16.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

17.

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

18.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

19.

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

20.

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

21.

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

22.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

23.

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

Updike, John

24.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

25.

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

Piero Milani

26.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

27.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

28.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

29.

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

West, Rebecca

30.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

31.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

32.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

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.

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

35.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

36.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

37.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

38.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

39.

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

Walt Whitman

40.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

41.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

42.

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

43.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

44.

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

45.

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

46.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

47.

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

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore