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

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

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, while the heart of the fool is in the house of entertainment.

Bible

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

Barenboim, Daniel

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

Cather, Willa

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

Jackson Pollock

No art can be noble which is incapable of expressing thought, and no art is capable of expressing thought which does not change.

Ruskin, John

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

10.

Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation.

Davis, Angela Y.

11.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

12.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

13.

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

Ciardi, John

14.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

15.

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

Duke Ellington

16.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

17.

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

18.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

19.

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

20.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

21.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

22.

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

23.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

24.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

25.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

26.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

27.

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

Bellow, Saul

28.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

29.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

30.

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

31.

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

Walt Whitman

32.

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

33.

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

34.

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

35.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

36.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

37.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

38.

I believe that if it were left to artists to choose their own labels, most would choose none.

Ben Shahn

39.

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

40.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

41.

The creation of art is not the fulfillment of a need but the creation of a need. The world never needed Beethoven's Fifth Symphony until he created it. Now we could not live without it.

Louis I Kahn

42.

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

43.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

44.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

45.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

46.

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

Parker, Dorothy

47.

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

48.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

49.

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

50.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo