Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- W. Somerset Maugham

Best Quotes about Art

Fine art, that exists for itself alone, is art in a final state of impotence. If nobody, including the artist, acknowledges art as a means of knowing the world, then art is relegated to a kind of rumpus room of the mind and the irresponsibility of the artist and the irrelevance of art to actual living becomes part and parcel of the practice of art.

Carter, Angela

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

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

Sand, George

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

The artist is the child of his time; but woe to him if he is also its disciple, or even its favorite.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

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

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

10.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

11.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

12.

The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and feel nobly.

Huxley, Aldous

13.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

14.

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

Goncourt, Edmond and Jules De

15.

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

16.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

17.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

19.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

20.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

21.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

22.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

23.

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

Updike, John

24.

Art for art's sake is a philosophy of the well-fed.

Yu Cao

25.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

26.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

27.

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

28.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

29.

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

Frost, Robert

30.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa

31.

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

32.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

33.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

34.

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

35.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

36.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

40.

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

Ovid

41.

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

Renoir, Pierre Auguste

42.

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