Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Yu Cao

Best Quotes about Art

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

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

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 see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

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

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

10.

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.

Andre Gide

11.

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

12.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

13.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

14.

A Great man is he who does not lose his childlike heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

15.

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

G. K. Chesterton

16.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

17.

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

Picasso, Pablo

18.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

19.

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

20.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

21.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

22.

Much of modern art is devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible. By getting us used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful, or embarrassing, art changes morals.

Sontag, Susan

23.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

24.

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

Driscoll, Louise

25.

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

26.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

27.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

28.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

29.

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

Shakespeare, William

30.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

31.

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

32.

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

Proverb

33.

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

34.

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

35.

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

36.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

37.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

38.

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

39.

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

40.

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

Ovid

41.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

42.

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

43.

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

Bonaparte, Napoleon

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

Parker, Dorothy

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.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

49.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

50.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.