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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Bierce, Ambrose

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

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

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

Shakespeare, William

10.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

11.

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

Camus, Albert

12.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

13.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

14.

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

15.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

16.

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

Midler, Bette

17.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

18.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

19.

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

20.

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

Lowell, James Russell

21.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

22.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

23.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

24.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

25.

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

Einstein, Albert

26.

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

27.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

28.

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

29.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

30.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

31.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

32.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

33.

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

34.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

35.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

36.

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

David Cronenberg

37.

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

38.

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

39.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

40.

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

Wilson, Robert

41.

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

42.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

43.

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

44.

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

45.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

46.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

47.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

49.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

50.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander