Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

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

Moses, Grandma

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

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

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

Ciardi, John

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

10.

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.

11.

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

12.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

13.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

14.

In every veil you see, the Divine Beauty is concealed, making every heart a slave to him. In love to him the heart finds its life; in desire for him the soul finds its happiness. The heart which loves a fair one here, though it knows it not, is really his lover.

Jami

15.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

16.

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

17.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

18.

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

Riding, Laura

19.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

20.

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Fortunately art is a community effort --a small but select community living in a spiritualized world endeavoring to interpret the wars and the solitudes of the flesh.

Ginsberg, Allen

24.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

25.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

26.

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

27.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

28.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

29.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

30.

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

31.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

32.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

33.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

34.

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

Joyce, James

35.

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

36.

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

Lowell, James Russell

37.

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.

38.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

39.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

40.

Love can heal a broken heart.

41.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

44.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

45.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

46.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

47.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

48.

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

Pablo Picasso

49.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

50.

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