Motivational Quotes

Art

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

- Mailer, Norman

Best Quotes about Art

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

Parker, Dorothy

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

Ciardi, John

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

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

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

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

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

Artists to my mind are the real architects of change, and not the political legislators who implement change after the fact.

Burroughs, William S.

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

Proverb, Chinese

10.

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

11.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

12.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

13.

At every party there are two kinds of people -- those who want to go home and those who don't. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other.

Landers, Ann

14.

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)

15.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

16.

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

Gutzkow

17.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

18.

If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.

Trotsky, Leon

19.

Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision.

Penn Jillette

20.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

21.

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

22.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

23.

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

24.

There is in fact no such thing as art for art's sake, art that stands above classes, art that is detached from or independent of politics. Proletarian literature and art are part of the whole proletarian revolutionary cause.

Zedong, Mao

25.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

26.

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

Duke Ellington

27.

Love can heal a broken heart.

28.

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.

29.

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.

30.

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

31.

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

Bangs, Lester

32.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

33.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

34.

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

Ward Jenkins

35.

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

Schumann, Robert

36.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

37.

Painting: The art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.

Ambrose Bierce

38.

If I didn't start painting, I would have raised chickens.

Moses, Grandma

39.

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

40.

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

41.

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

42.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

43.

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

44.

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

45.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

46.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

47.

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

48.

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

Henry Ward Beecher

49.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

50.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu