Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Yu Cao

Best Quotes about Art

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

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

An artist must be a reactionary. He has to stand out against the tenor of the age and not go flopping along.

Waugh, Evelyn

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

Works of art, in my opinion, are the only objects in the material universe to possess internal order, and that is why, though I don't believe that only art matters, I do believe in Art for Art's sake.

E. M. Forster

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

Melville, Herman

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

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

Cioran, E. M.

10.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

11.

There must be hearts which know the depths of our being, and swear by us, even when the whole world forsakes us.

Gutzkow

12.

Inside you there's an artist you don't know about. He's not interested in how things look different in moonlight.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

13.

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

Cather, Willa

14.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

Arp, Jean

15.

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

16.

The artist is the opposite of the politically minded individual, the opposite of the reformer, the opposite of the idealist. The artist does not tinker with the universe; he recreates it out of his own experience and understanding of life.

Miller, Henry

17.

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

18.

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

19.

Art is the imposing of a pattern on experience, and our aesthetic enjoyment is recognition of the pattern.

Alfred North Whitehead

20.

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

21.

If that's art, I'm a Hottentot!

Truman, Harry S

22.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

23.

The artist vocation is to send light into the human heart.

Schumann, Robert

24.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

25.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

26.

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

Bellow, Saul

27.

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

Murdoch, Iris

28.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

29.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

30.

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

Gide, Andre

31.

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

32.

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

G. K. Chesterton

33.

When I judge art, I take my painting and put it next to a God made object like a tree or flower. If it clashes, it is not art.

Chagall, Marc

34.

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

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Bible

38.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

39.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

40.

An artist is forced by others to paint out of his own free will.

Kooning, Willem De

41.

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

Churchill, Winston

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

Midler, Bette

45.

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

46.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

47.

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