Motivational Quotes

Art

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

- Pope, Alexander

Best Quotes about Art

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

Lowell, James Russell

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

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

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

Kronenberger, Louis

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

Abstract Art: A product of the untalented, sold by the unprincipled to the utterly bewildered.

Capp, Al

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

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

10.

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

Picasso, Pablo

11.

A painting in a museum hears more ridiculous opinions than anything else in the world.

Edmond de Goncourt

12.

Only an artist can interpret the meaning of life.

Novalis

13.

Art is the desire of a man to express himself, to record the reactions of his personality to the world he lives in.

Amy Lowell

14.

What I dream of is an art of balance.

Henri Matisse

15.

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

Proverb, Chinese

16.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause --it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

Rosenberg, Harold

17.

Each of the arts whose office is to refine, purify, adorn, embellish and grace life is under the patronage of a muse, no god being found worthy to preside over them.

Farnham, Eliza

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.

Martyrdom does not end something, it only a beginning.

Gandhi, Indira

20.

I passionately hate the idea of being with it, I think an artist has always to be out of step with his time.

Orson Welles

21.

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

Elizabeth Bowen

22.

Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing --to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

24.

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

25.

Great hearts steadily send forth the secret forces that incessantly draw great events.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

26.

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.

27.

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

28.

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

Ciardi, John

29.

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

Klee, Paul

30.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

31.

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

32.

The focus should be on the players. I'm here a long time. You can call me in the summer. Our seniors will be gone.

Smith, Dean

33.

Classic art was the art of necessity: modern romantic art bears the stamp of caprice and chance.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

34.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

35.

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

36.

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

37.

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

Frye, Northrop

38.

Those who write for lucre or fame are grosser than the cartel robbers, for they steal the genius of the people, which is its will to resist evil.

Dahlberg, Edward

39.

The arts are not just instantaneous pleasure -- if you don't like it, the artist is wrong. I belong to the generation which says if you don't like it, you don't understand and you ought to find out.

Drummond, John

40.

A heart in love with beauty never grows old.

Proverb, Turkish

41.

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

Driscoll, Louise

42.

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

43.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

44.

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

Suttner, Bertha Von

45.

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

46.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

47.

Artists must be sacrificed to their art.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

48.

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

49.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.

Cather, Willa