Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Brancusi, Constantin

Best Quotes about Art

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

In free society art is not a weapon. Artists are not engineers of the soul.

Kennedy, John F.

Art -- the one achievement of Man which has made the long trip up from all fours seem well advised.

Thurber, James

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

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

Pictures deface walls more often than they decorate them.

Wright, Frank Lloyd

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

Duke Ellington

10.

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

11.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

12.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

13.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

14.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

15.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

16.

If we are to change our world view, images have to change. The artist now has a very important job to do. He's not a little peripheral figure entertaining rich people, he's really needed.

Hockney, David

17.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

18.

Many bad artists will tell you that art is life. There's a subtle difference however. You can turn your back on art

19.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

20.

The biggest problem with every art is by the use of appearance to create a loftier reality.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

21.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

22.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

23.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

24.

Art need no longer be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us.

Debord, Guy

25.

What stronger breastplate than a heart untainted. [Henry Iv]

Shakespeare, William

26.

Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.

Latimer, Bishop Hugh

27.

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

28.

The powerful play goes on -- and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

29.

Art is man's expression of his joy in labor.

Morris, William

30.

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

31.

Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

32.

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

Andre Gide

33.

The heart is the best reflective thinker.

Phillips, Wendell

34.

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

Jackson Pollock

35.

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

36.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Riding, Laura

37.

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

38.

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

M. C. Richards

39.

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

40.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

41.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

42.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

W. Somerset Maugham

46.

The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.

Keller, Helen

47.

Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

Twain, Mark

48.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

49.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

50.

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