Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Roosevelt, Theodore

Best Quotes about Art

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

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

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

Simonides

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

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

Piet Mondrian

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

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

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

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

Eliot, T. S.

11.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

12.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

13.

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

14.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

15.

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

16.

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

17.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

18.

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

Wilson, Robert

19.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

20.

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

Picasso, Pablo

21.

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

22.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

23.

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

24.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

25.

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

26.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

27.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

28.

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

Edith Wharton

29.

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

Proust, Marcel

30.

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.

31.

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

32.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

33.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

34.

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

35.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

36.

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

37.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

38.

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

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

41.

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

Motherwell, Robert

42.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

43.

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

44.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

45.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

46.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

47.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

48.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

49.

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

Parker, Dorothy

50.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav