Motivational Quotes

Art

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

- Proverb, Danish

Best Quotes about Art

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

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

Duke Ellington

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

10.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

11.

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

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

16.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

17.

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

Anderson, Bill

18.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

19.

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

20.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

21.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

22.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

23.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

24.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

25.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

26.

Drink, and dance and laugh and lie, love the reeling midnight through, for tomorrow we shall die! (But, alas, we never do.)

Parker, Dorothy

27.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

28.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

29.

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

Eliot, T. S.

30.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

31.

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

32.

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

Updike, John

33.

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

West, Rebecca

34.

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

35.

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

36.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

37.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

38.

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

Bellow, Saul

39.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

40.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

43.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

44.

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

45.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

46.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

47.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

48.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

49.

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

Proust, Marcel

50.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.