Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

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

Walt Whitman

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

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

Sand, George

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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

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

10.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

11.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

12.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

13.

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

Eliot, T. S.

14.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

15.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

16.

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

Proust, Marcel

17.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

18.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

19.

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

20.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

21.

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.

22.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

23.

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

Simonides

24.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

25.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

26.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

27.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

28.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

29.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

30.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

31.

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

Blackie, Professor

32.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

33.

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

34.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

35.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

36.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

37.

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

38.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

39.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

40.

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

Bible

41.

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

42.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

43.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

44.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

45.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

46.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

47.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

48.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

49.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

50.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman