Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Baudelaire, Charles

Best Quotes about Art

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

I never spend more than one hour in a gallery. That is as long as one's power of appreciation persists.

W. Somerset Maugham

Why should I buy expensive art when I can make my own.

Piero Milani

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

Mailer, Norman

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

Wolfe, Thomas

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

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

Yu Cao

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

10.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

Trilling, Lionel

11.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

12.

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

13.

Good art however immoral is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

Pound, Ezra

14.

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

15.

Doubt obscures the true vision of the heart.

16.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

17.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

18.

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

Jackson Pollock

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.

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.

21.

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

Barenboim, Daniel

22.

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

23.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

24.

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

Eliot, T. S.

25.

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways.

Pascal, Blaise

26.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

27.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

28.

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul. The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of Artist.

Poe, Edgar Allan

29.

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

Pablo Picasso

30.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

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.

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

33.

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

Burroughs, William S.

34.

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

35.

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

36.

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

Shakespeare, William

37.

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

38.

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

39.

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

40.

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

Gill, Eric

41.

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

Bible

42.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

43.

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