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

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

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

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

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

Brown, John Mason

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

13.

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

Joyce, James

14.

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

15.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

16.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

18.

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

19.

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

20.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

21.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

22.

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

23.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

24.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

25.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

26.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

27.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

28.

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

29.

As the unity of the modern world becomes increasingly a technological rather than a social affair, the techniques of the arts provide the most valuable means of insight into the real direction of our own collective purposes.

Mcluhan, Marshall

30.

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

Ciardi, John

31.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

32.

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

Klee, Paul

33.

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

34.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

35.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

36.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

37.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

38.

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

39.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

40.

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

Parker, Dorothy

41.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

42.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

43.

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

44.

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

W. Somerset Maugham

45.

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

46.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

47.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

48.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

49.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

50.

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