Motivational Quotes

Art

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

- Trilling, Lionel

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

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

Capp, Al

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

10.

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

11.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

12.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

13.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

14.

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

15.

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

Blackie, Professor

16.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

17.

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

Kennedy, John F.

18.

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

19.

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

Truman, Harry S

20.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

21.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

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

23.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

24.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

25.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

26.

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

Baryshnikov, Mikhail

27.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

28.

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

29.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

30.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

31.

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

32.

A painting in a museum probably hears more foolish remarks than anything else in the world.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

33.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

34.

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

35.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

36.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

37.

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

38.

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

39.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

40.

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

Varese, Edward

41.

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

42.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

43.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

44.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

45.

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

46.

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

47.

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

48.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

49.

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

Sand, George

50.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques