Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Ginsberg, Allen

Best Quotes about Art

Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.

Tzara, Tristan

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

Art is a jealous mistress; and if a man have a genius for painting, poetry, music, architecture or philosophy, he makes a bad husband and an ill provider.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

Jefferson, Thomas

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

Shaw, George Bernard

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

Ciardi, John

No man dies for what he knows to be true. Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.

Wilde, Oscar

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

Aristophanes

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Klee, Paul

10.

The work of art, just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning, seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness, the rigidity, the regularity, the luster on every interior and exterior facet, of the crystal.

Breton, Andre

11.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

12.

Follow your heart, but be quiet for a while first. Ask questions, then feel the answer. Learn to trust your heart.

13.

Nothing is less in our power than the heart, and far from commanding we are forced to obey it.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

14.

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

15.

To say that a work of art is good, but incomprehensible to the majority of men, is the same as saying of some kind of food that it is very good but that most people can't eat it.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

16.

Everyone sees the unseen in proportion to the clarity of his heart, and that depends upon how much he has polished it. Whoever has polished it more sees more -- more unseen forms become manifest to him.

Rumi, Jalal-Uddin

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

What we play is life.

Louis Armstrong

21.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

22.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

23.

Some people carry their heart in their head and some carry their head in their heart. The trick is to keep them apart yet working together.

Hare, David

24.

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

25.

Art is parasitic on life, just as criticism is parasitic on art.

Tynan, Kenneth

26.

The head learns new things, but the heart forever practices old experiences.

Beecher, Henry Ward

27.

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

Paz, Octavio

28.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

29.

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

Blackie, Professor

30.

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

31.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

Shaw, George Bernard

32.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

33.

If the wolf had ever come to our back door, he'd have had to bring a picnic lunch.

Anderson, Bill

34.

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

John F. Kennedy

35.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

36.

Illusions are art, for the feeling person, and it is by art that you live, if you do.

Elizabeth Bowen

37.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

38.

It is either easy or impossible.

Dali, Salvador

39.

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

Andre Gide

40.

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

41.

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

Kempis, Thomas

42.

There are in every generation those who shrink from the ultimate sacrifice, but there are in every generation those who make it with joy and laughter and these are the salt of the generations.

Pearse, Patrick Henry

43.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

44.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.

Joseph Chilton Pearce

45.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

46.

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

Frye, Northrop

47.

Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Picasso, Pablo

48.

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

Camus, Albert

49.

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

50.

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