Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Simonides

Best Quotes about Art

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

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

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

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

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

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

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

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

10.

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

Weil, Simone

11.

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

12.

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

Lowell, James Russell

13.

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

14.

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

15.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

16.

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

Edith Wharton

17.

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

Ciardi, John

18.

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

19.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

20.

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

21.

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

Midler, Bette

22.

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

Anderson, Lindsay

23.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

26.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

27.

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

28.

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

Bierce, Ambrose

29.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

30.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

31.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

32.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

33.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

34.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

35.

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

36.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

37.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

38.

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

Eliot, T. S.

39.

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

40.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

41.

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

42.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

43.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

44.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

45.

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

David Cronenberg

46.

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

47.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

48.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

49.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

50.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson