Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Franklin, Benjamin

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

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

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

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

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

10.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

11.

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

12.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

13.

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

14.

One thing that makes art different from life is that in art things have a shape... it allows us to fix our emotions on events at the moment they occur, it permits a union of heart and mind and tongue and tear.

French, Marilyn

15.

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

16.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

17.

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.

18.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

19.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

20.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

21.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

22.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

23.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

24.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

25.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

26.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

27.

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

Shakespeare, William

28.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

29.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

30.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

31.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

32.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

33.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

34.

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

Edmond de Goncourt

35.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

36.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

37.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

38.

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

Pascal, Blaise

39.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

40.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

41.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

42.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

43.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

44.

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

Burroughs, William S.

45.

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

Picasso, Pablo

46.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

47.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

48.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

49.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

50.

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