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

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

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

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

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

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

Woodberry, George E.

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

10.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

11.

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

12.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

13.

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

Holyfield, Evander

14.

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

15.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

17.

The essence of all art is to have pleasure in giving pleasure

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

18.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

19.

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

Blackie, Professor

20.

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

Ruskin, John

21.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

23.

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

Arp, Jean

24.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

25.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

26.

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

27.

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

Shakespeare, William

28.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

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.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

31.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

32.

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

33.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

34.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

35.

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

36.

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

37.

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

38.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

39.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

40.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

41.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

42.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

43.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

44.

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

Bible

45.

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