Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

Art for art's sake? I should think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our middling race has produced. It is the cry of a thousand sentinels, the echo from a thousand labyrinths, it is the lighthouse which cannot be hidden... it is the best evidence we can have of our dignity.

Forster, Edward M.

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

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

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

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

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

Art is an absolute mistress; she will not be coquetted with or slighted; she requires the most entire self-devotion, and she repays with grand triumphs.

Cushman, Charlotte Saunders

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

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

10.

Art has an enemy called ignorance.

Johnson, Ben

11.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

12.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

13.

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

Arp, Jean

14.

Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist: Give me leave to do my utmost.

Isak Dineson

15.

Two things are bad for the heart -- running up stairs and running down people.

Baruch, Bernard M.

16.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Gutzkow

20.

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

Berle, Adolf

21.

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

22.

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

23.

Twentieth-century art may start with nothing, but it flourishes by virtue of its belief in itself, in the possibility of control over what seems essentially uncontrollable, in the coherence of the inchoate, and in its ability to create its own values.

Alvarez, A.

24.

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

Andre Gide

25.

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

Jackson Pollock

26.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

27.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

28.

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

29.

Thou art my glory and the exultation of y heart: thou art my hope and refuge in the day of my trouble.

Kempis, Thomas

30.

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

31.

There is nothing enduring in life for a women except what she builds in a man's heart.

Anderson, Judith

32.

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.

33.

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

Cioran, E. M.

34.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

35.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

36.

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

Barney, Natalie Clifford

37.

Art is the only thing that can go on mattering, once it has stopped hurting.

Bowen, Elizabeth

38.

Art is the most passionate orgy within man's grasp.

Dubuffet, Jean

39.

The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public. The conventional is uncritically enjoyed, and the truly new is criticized with aversion.

Benjamin, Walter

40.

Art is good when it springs from necessity. This kind of origin is the guarantee of its value; there is no other.

Cassady, Neal

41.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

42.

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

43.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

44.

Feminist art is not some tiny creek running off the great river of real art. It is not some crack in an otherwise flawless stone. It is, quite spectacularly I think, art which is not based on the subjugation of one half of the species. It is art which will take the great human themes --love, death, heroism, suffering, history itself --and render them fully human. It may also, though perhaps our imaginations are so mutilated now that we are incapable even of the ambition, introduce a new theme, one as great and as rich as those others --should we call it joy?

Dworkin, Andrea

45.

No sheath shall hold what finds its home in flesh.

Proverb

46.

Like other parties of the kind, it was first silent, then talky, then argumentative, then disputatious, then unintelligible, then altogether, then inarticulate, and then drunk. When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder, it was difficult to get down again without stumbling.

Byron, Lord

47.

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

48.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

49.

The moment you cheat for the sake of beauty, you know you're an artist.

Jacob, Max

50.

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

Barenboim, Daniel