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

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

Faint hearts never win fair ladies.

Proverb, Danish

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

Wilson, Robert

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 martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

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

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

10.

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

Motherwell, Robert

11.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

12.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

13.

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

Tynan, Kenneth

14.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

15.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

16.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

17.

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

18.

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

19.

Photography, fortunately, to me has not only been a profession but also a contact between people - to understand human nature and record, if possible, the best in each individual.

Nickolas Muray

20.

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

21.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

22.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

23.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

24.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

25.

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

Ambrose Bierce

26.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

27.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

31.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

32.

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

33.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

34.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

35.

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

36.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

37.

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

Franklin, Benjamin

38.

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

Bible

39.

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

Frost, Robert

40.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

41.

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

Cioran, E. M.

42.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

43.

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

44.

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

45.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

46.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

47.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

48.

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.