Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

- W. Somerset Maugham

Best Quotes about Art

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

Edmond de Goncourt

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

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang 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

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

10.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

11.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

12.

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

13.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

14.

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

15.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

16.

The True Artist has the planet for his pedestal; the adventurer, after years of strife, has nothing broader than his shoes.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

18.

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

19.

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

Voznesensky, Andrei

20.

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

21.

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

22.

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

Lowell, James Russell

23.

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

24.

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

25.

The artist is extremely lucky who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business.

Berryman, John

26.

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

27.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

28.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

29.

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.

30.

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

Wilson, Robert

31.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

32.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

33.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.