Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Renoir, Pierre Auguste

Best Quotes about Art

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

Ovid

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

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

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

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Kempis, Thomas

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

10.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

11.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

12.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

13.

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

Ruskin, John

14.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

15.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

16.

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

17.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

18.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

19.

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

20.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

21.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

22.

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

23.

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

West, Rebecca

24.

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

Sand, George

25.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

26.

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

Shakespeare, William

27.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

28.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

29.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

30.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

31.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

32.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

33.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

34.

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

35.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

36.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

37.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

38.

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

39.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

40.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

41.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

42.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

43.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Peri, Gabriel

47.

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

48.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham