Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

I am as content to die for God's eternal truth on the scaffold as in any other way.

Brown, John Mason

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

Frye, Northrop

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

He bores me. He ought to have stuck to his flying machine. [On Leonardo Da Vinci]

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

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.

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

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

Cioran, E. M.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

10.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

11.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

12.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

13.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

14.

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

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

15.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

16.

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

17.

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

Thurber, James

18.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

19.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

20.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

21.

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

22.

The vitality of a new movement in Art must be gauged by the fury it arouses.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

23.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

24.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

25.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

26.

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

27.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

28.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

29.

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

30.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

31.

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

32.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

33.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

34.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

35.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

36.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

37.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

38.

As a general truth, it is safe to say that any picture that produces a moral impression is a bad picture.

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

39.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

40.

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

41.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

42.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

43.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

44.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

45.

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

46.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

47.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

48.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

49.

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

Simonides

50.

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