Motivational Quotes

Art

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

- Saint-Victor, Richard of

Best Quotes about Art

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

Edith Wharton

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

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

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

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

10.

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

Joyce, James

11.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

12.

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

13.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

15.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

16.

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

Lowell, James Russell

17.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

18.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

19.

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

20.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

21.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

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.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

24.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

25.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

26.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

27.

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

Simonides

28.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

29.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

30.

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

31.

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

32.

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

33.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

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

35.

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

Weil, Simone

36.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

37.

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

38.

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

Picasso, Pablo

39.

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

40.

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

David Cronenberg

41.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

46.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.