Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Truman, Harry S

Best Quotes about Art

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

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

Whether you call my heart affectionate, or you call it womanish: I confess, that to my misfortune, it is soft.

Ovid

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

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

Proust, Marcel

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

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

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

10.

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

11.

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

12.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

13.

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

14.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

15.

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

20.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

21.

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

Riding, Laura

22.

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

Klee, Paul

23.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

24.

What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite?

Browning, Elizabeth Barrett

25.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

26.

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

27.

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

Novalis

28.

Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those he has selected.

Wilde, Oscar

29.

I shut my eyes in order to see.

Paul Gauguin

30.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

31.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

32.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

33.

Art is the human disposition of sensible or intelligible matter for an esthetic end.

Joyce, James

34.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

35.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

36.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

37.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

38.

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

39.

If the heart wanders or is distracted, bring it back to the point quite gently and replace it tenderly in its Master's presence. And even if you did nothing during the whole ofyour hour but bring your heart back and place it again in Our Lord's presence, though it went away every time you brought it back, your hour would be very well employed.

Francis De Sales, St.

40.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

41.

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

42.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

43.

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

Wolfe, Thomas

44.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

45.

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

Ovid

46.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

47.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

48.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

49.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

50.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides