Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

- Sand, George

Best Quotes about Art

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

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

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

10.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

11.

It is not the size of a man but the size of his heart that matters.

Holyfield, Evander

12.

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

Varese, Edward

13.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

14.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

15.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

16.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

17.

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

18.

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

19.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

20.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

21.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

22.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

23.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

24.

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

Weil, Simone

25.

Love can heal a broken heart.

26.

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

27.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

28.

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

29.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

30.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

31.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

32.

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

33.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

34.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

35.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

36.

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

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

37.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

38.

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

39.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

40.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

41.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

42.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

43.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

44.

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

45.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

46.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

47.

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

48.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

49.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

50.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo