Motivational Quotes

Art

Art imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

- Updike, John

Best Quotes about Art

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

Eliot, T. S.

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

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.

Peri, Gabriel

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

Art at its most significant is a distant early warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen.

Mcluhan, Marshall

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

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

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

10.

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

11.

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

12.

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.

13.

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

14.

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

Frost, Robert

15.

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

16.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

17.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

18.

Enjoyed it! One more drink and I'd have been under the host.

Parker, Dorothy

19.

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

Thurber, James

20.

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

21.

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

22.

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

23.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

24.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

25.

Painting is an attempt to come to terms with life. There are as many solutions as there are human beings.

George Tooker

26.

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

Cioran, E. M.

27.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

28.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

29.

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

Bellow, Saul

30.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

31.

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

32.

We are not here to triumph by fighting, by strata gem, or by resistance, not to fight with beasts as men. We have fought the beast and have conquered. We have only to conquer now,by suffering. This is the easier victory.

Eliot, T. S.

33.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

34.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

35.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

36.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

37.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

38.

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

Truman, Harry S

39.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

40.

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

Sand, George

41.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

42.

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

43.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

44.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

45.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

46.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

47.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

48.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

49.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

50.

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