Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Weil, Simone

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

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

Motherwell, Robert

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

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

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

10.

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

Wordsworth, William

11.

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in modern art is merely romantic fiction. The game is completed and the trophies distributed long before the public knows what has happened.

Wolfe, Thomas

12.

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

13.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

15.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

16.

The primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

Baldwin, James

17.

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

18.

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

Frost, Robert

19.

It is more difficult, and it calls for higher energies of soul, to live a martyr than to die one.

Mann, Horace

20.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

21.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

22.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

23.

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

24.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

25.

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

26.

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

27.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

28.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

29.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

30.

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

Pascal, Blaise

31.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

32.

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

Picasso, Pablo

33.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

34.

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.

35.

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

36.

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.

37.

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

38.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

39.

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

Jackson Pollock

40.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

41.

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

42.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

43.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

44.

Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.

Cather, Willa

45.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

46.

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

Brown, John Mason

47.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

48.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

49.

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.