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

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

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

Duke Ellington

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

10.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

11.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

12.

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

13.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

14.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

15.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

16.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

17.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

18.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

19.

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

Einstein, Albert

20.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

21.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

22.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

23.

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

Joyce, James

24.

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

25.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

26.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

27.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

28.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

29.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

30.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

31.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

32.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

33.

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

34.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

35.

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

36.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

37.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

38.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

39.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

40.

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

41.

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

Al Capp

42.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

43.

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

44.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

45.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

46.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

47.

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

48.

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

Jackson Pollock

49.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

50.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon