Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Wilson, Robert

Best Quotes about Art

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

It is not the language of painters but the language of nature which one should listen to the feeling for the things themselves, for reality, is more important than the feeling for pictures.

Gogh, Vincent Van

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

Painting is just another way of keeping a diary.

Pablo Picasso

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

I suppose no matter what I'm drawing, there will always be some sort of question in my mind about it. A work of art (even cartoon art)is never really finished; it is abandoned.

Brooke McEldowney

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

Mann, Horace

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

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

Ovid

10.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

11.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy

12.

I can't tell you what art does and how it does it, but I know that often art has judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. Art, when it functions like this, becomes a meeting-place of the invisible, the irreducible, the enduring, guts, and honor.

Berger, John

13.

The first mistake of Art is to assume that it's serious.

Bangs, Lester

14.

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

15.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

16.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

17.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

18.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

19.

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

20.

The heart will break, but broken live on.

Byron, Lord

21.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

22.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

23.

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

24.

Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

25.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

26.

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

27.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

28.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

29.

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

30.

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

31.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

32.

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

33.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

34.

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

Melville, Herman

35.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

36.

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

37.

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

Brancusi, Constantin

38.

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

39.

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

40.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

41.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

42.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

43.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

44.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

45.

I'm still an artist. I'm never gonna do a shit movie, because I've got my modeling to support me.

Jovovich, Milla

46.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

47.

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

48.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

49.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

50.

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