Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Ovid

Best Quotes about Art

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

Nothing right can be accomplished in art without enthusiasm.

Schumann, Robert

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

Lowell, James Russell

Art is permitted to survive only if it renounces the right to be different, and integrates itself into the omnipotent realm of the profane.

Adorno, Theodor W.

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

Ionesco, Eugene

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

Sand, George

Pop artists deal with the lowly trivia of possessions and equipment that the present generation is lugging along with it on its safari into the future.

Ballard, J. G.

It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.

Midler, Bette

10.

Artists are, above all, men who want to become inhuman.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

11.

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

Thurber, James

12.

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.

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.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

15.

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

16.

I do not know what the heart of a rascal may be, but I know what is in the heart of an honest man; it is horrible.

Maistre, Joseph De

17.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)

18.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

19.

Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.

Gill, Eric

20.

There are painters who transform the sun to a yellow spot, but there are others who with the help of their art and their intelligence, transform a yellow spot into the sun.

Pablo Picasso

21.

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

22.

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

23.

There is only one art, whose sole criterion is the power, the authenticity, the revelatory insight, the courage and suggestiveness with which it seeks its truth. Thus, from the standpoint of the work and its worth it is irrelevant to which political ideas the artist as a citizen claims allegiance, which ideas he would like to serve with his work or whether he holds any such ideas at all.

Havel, Vaclav

24.

Experiment is necessary in establishing an academy, but certain principles must apply to this business of art as to any other business which affects the artistic tic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today speak a different language.

Menzies, Robert

25.

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

Jacob, Max

26.

We have art in order not to die of the truth.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

27.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

28.

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

29.

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

Klee, Paul

30.

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

31.

Man is always partial and is quite right to be. Even impartiality is partial.

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

32.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

33.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

34.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

35.

If I keep a green bough in my heart, the singing bird will come.

Proverb, Chinese

36.

It doesn't matter if people are interested. It's about you taking your stuff and shouting out into the void.

Jadelr and Cristina Cordova

37.

I see little of more importance to the future of our country and of civilization than full recognition of the place of the artist. If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Kennedy, John F.

38.

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

39.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

40.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

41.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

42.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

43.

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

44.

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

Riding, Laura

45.

To write is to become disinterested. There is a certain renunciation in art.

Camus, Albert

46.

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

47.

The artistic temperament is a disease that affects amateurs. Artists of a large and wholesome vitality get rid of their art easily, as they breathe easily or perspire easily. But in artists of less force, the thing becomes a pressure, and produces a definite pain, which is called the artistic temperament.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

48.

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

49.

Impartial. Unable to perceive any promise of personal advantage from espousing either side of a controversy.

Bierce, Ambrose

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