Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Ciardi, John

Best Quotes about Art

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

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Gutzkow

Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood -- never.

Camus, Albert

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

Frye, Northrop

There is no true expertise in the humanities without knowing all of the humanities. Art is a vast, ancient interconnected web-work, a fabricated tradition. Over-concentration on any one point is a distortion.

Paglia, Camille

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

Ciardi, John

The martyr cannot be dishonored. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of fame; every prison a more illustrious abode.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

[Abstract art is] a product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Al Capp

10.

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

11.

I have joined my heart to thee: all that exists are thou. O Lord, beloved of my heart, thou art the home of all; where indeed is the heart in which thou dost not dwell?

Jafar

12.

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

M. C. Richards

13.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

14.

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

Arp, Jean

15.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

16.

What of us lies in the hearts of others is our truest and deepest self.

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

21.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

22.

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

Schumann, Robert

23.

It is the cause, not the death that makes the martyr.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

24.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

25.

Where are you searching for me, friend? Look! Here am I right within you. Not in temple, nor in mosque, not in Kaaba nor Kailas, but here right within you am I.

Kabir

26.

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

27.

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

Diana, Princess of Wales

28.

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

29.

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

30.

Within your heart, keep one still, secret spot where dreams may go.

Driscoll, Louise

31.

Their is a road from the eye to heart that does not go through the intellect.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

32.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Rich, Adrienne

33.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

34.

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

35.

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

36.

It isn't enough for your heart to break because everybody's heart is broken now.

Ginsberg, Allen

37.

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

38.

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

39.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

John Singer Sargent

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.

What distinguishes modern art from the art of other ages is criticism.

Paz, Octavio

42.

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

Kennedy, John F.

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

46.

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

47.

Had we never lov'd sae kindly, Had we never lov'd sae blindly, Never met -- or never parted -- we had never been broken-hearted.

Burns, Robert

48.

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.

49.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

50.

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

Sand, George