Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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

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

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

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

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

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

Piet Mondrian

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

10.

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

11.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

12.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

13.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

15.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

16.

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

17.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of a wise man is in his heart.

Franklin, Benjamin

21.

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

David Cronenberg

22.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

23.

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.

24.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

25.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

26.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

27.

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

28.

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

Weil, Simone

29.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

30.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

31.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

32.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

33.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

34.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

35.

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

36.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

37.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

38.

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

Connolly, Cyril

39.

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.

40.

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

Al Capp

41.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

42.

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

43.

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

44.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

45.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

46.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

47.

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