Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

Brancusi, Constantin

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

Ionesco, Eugene

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

Chopra, Deepak

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

Churchill, Winston

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

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

In art there are tears that lie too deep for thought.

Kronenberger, Louis

The highest art is always the most religious, and the greatest artist is always a devout person.

Blackie, Professor

10.

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

11.

It is a weakness that I lead from my heart, and not my head?

Diana, Princess of Wales

12.

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

13.

As for types like my own, obscurely motivated by the conviction that our existence was worthless if we didn't make a turning point of it, we were assigned to the humanities, to poetry, philosophy, painting -- the nursery games of humankind, which had to be left behind when the age of science began. The humanities would be called upon to choose a wallpaper for the crypt, as the end drew near.

Bellow, Saul

14.

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

Ciardi, John

15.

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

16.

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

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

17.

Don't waste time trying to break a man's heart; be satisfied if you can just manage to chip it in a brand new place.

Rowland, Helen

18.

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

Ovid

19.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

20.

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

21.

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

22.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

23.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

24.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

25.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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

27.

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

Yu Cao

28.

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

29.

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

Tagore, Rabindranath

30.

Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.

Eugene Delacroix

31.

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Pound, Ezra

32.

Love can heal a broken heart.

33.

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

34.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

35.

The eyes see what the heart loves. If the heart loves God and is single in this devotion, then the eyes will see God whether others see Him or not.

Wiersbe, Warren

36.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

37.

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

38.

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

39.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

40.

Surely all art is the result of one's having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go any further.

Rilke, Rainer Maria

41.

If you were in a burning house and there was a cat and a Rembrandt, what would you save? The cat...you would save the cat, because the cat is alive. The art is dead. It's just paint on a canvas, ink on a page. To live for art is to deny life. It's just to destroy life.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

42.

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.

43.

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

44.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

45.

Art the end result of perception, wisdom, intelligence, discipline, hard work, passion, luck, accident, and coincidence.

46.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

47.

If we keep an open mind, too much is likely to fall into it.

Barney, Natalie Clifford

48.

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

Alfred North Whitehead