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

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

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.

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

Burroughs, William S.

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

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

Joyce, James

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

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

Tynan, Kenneth

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

Simonides

10.

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

11.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

12.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

13.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

14.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

15.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

16.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

17.

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

Motherwell, Robert

18.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

19.

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

Pablo Picasso

20.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

21.

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

Camus, Albert

22.

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

Keller, Helen

23.

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

24.

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

25.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

26.

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

Andre Gide

27.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

28.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

29.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

30.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

31.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

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

33.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

34.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

35.

Look at every path closely and deliberately, then ask ourselves this crucial question: Does this path have a heart? If it does, then the path is good. If it doesn't, it is of no use.

Castaneda, Carlos

36.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

37.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

38.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

39.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

40.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

41.

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

42.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

Ruskin, John

44.

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

Bible

45.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

46.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

47.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

48.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

49.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

50.

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.