Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Walt Whitman

Best Quotes about Art

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

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 more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

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

Ovid

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

10.

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

Joyce, James

11.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

12.

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

13.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

14.

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

Murdoch, Iris

15.

The object of art is to give life a shape. [Midsummer Nights Dream]

Shakespeare, William

16.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

17.

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

18.

The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.

Jackson Pollock

19.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

20.

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

Wilson, Robert

21.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

22.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

23.

Whenever, at a party, I have been in the mood to study fools, I have always looked for a great beauty: they always gather round her like flies around a fruit stall.

Richter, Jean Paul

24.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

25.

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

26.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

27.

An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why.

Faulkner, William

28.

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

29.

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

Burroughs, William S.

30.

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

31.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

32.

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

33.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

35.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

36.

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

Dubuffet, Jean

37.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

38.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

39.

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

Jeff Melvoin

40.

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

41.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

42.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

43.

I have been astonished that men could die martyrs for religion --I have shuddered at it. I shudder no more --I could be martyred for my religion --Love is my religion --I could die for that.

Keats, John

44.

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

45.

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

46.

If I spit, they will take my spit and frame it as great art.

Picasso, Pablo

47.

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

Gide, Andre

48.

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

49.

Even if I died in the service of the nation, I would be proud of it. Every drop of my blood... will contribute to the growth of this nation and to make it strong and dynamic.

Gandhi, Indira

50.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone