Motivational Quotes

Art

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

- Stein, Gertrude

Best Quotes about Art

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

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

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

Burroughs, William S.

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

Bible

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

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

Novalis

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

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

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

10.

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

Riding, Laura

11.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

12.

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

13.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

14.

The difference between a man who faces death for the sake of an idea and an imitator who goes in search of martyrdom is that whilst the former expresses his idea most fully in death it is the strange feeling of bitterness which comes from failure that the latter really enjoys; the former rejoices in his victory, the latter in his suffering.

Kierkegaard, S°ren

15.

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

Sand, George

16.

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

17.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

18.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

Crowley, Aleister

19.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

20.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

21.

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)

22.

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

23.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

24.

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

25.

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

26.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

27.

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

28.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

29.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

30.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

31.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

32.

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

Eugene Delacroix

33.

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

Jackson Pollock

34.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

35.

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

36.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

37.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

38.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

42.

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

43.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

44.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

45.

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

46.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

47.

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

Ovid

48.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

49.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

50.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra