Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

I say that good painters imitated nature; but that bad ones vomited it.

Miguel de Cervantes

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Geldzahler, Henry

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

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

Herder, Johann Gottfried Von

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting, and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

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

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

Kempis, Thomas

Why should I go into details, we have nothing that is not perishable except what our hearts and our intellects endows us with.

Ovid

10.

As the twentieth century ends, commerce and culture are coming closer together. The distinction between life and art has been eroded by fifty years of enhanced communications, ever-improving reproduction technologies and increasing wealth.

Bayley, Stephen

11.

Personality is everything in art and poetry.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

12.

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

13.

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.

14.

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

15.

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

16.

Art is so wonderfully irrational, exuberantly pointless, but necessary all the same. Pointless and yet necessary, that's hard for a puritan to understand.

Grass, Gunther

17.

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

Al Capp

18.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

19.

The way of the world is, to praise dead saints, and persecute living ones.

Howe, Nathaniel

20.

This is the artist, then, life's hungry man, the glutton of eternity, beauty's miser, glory's slave.

Wolfe, Thomas

21.

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

Riding, Laura

22.

One hour of life, crowded to the full with glorious action, and filled with noble risks, is worth whole years of those mean observances of paltry decorum, in which men steal through existence, like sluggish waters through a marsh, without either honor or observation.

Scott, Sir Walter

23.

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

24.

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

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

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 imitates Nature in this; not to dare is to dwindle.

Updike, John

27.

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting with the gift of speech.

Simonides

28.

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

29.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

30.

Art is on the side of the oppressed. Think before you shudder at the simplistic dictum and its heretical definition of the freedom of art. For if art is freedom of the spirit, how can it exist within the oppressors?

Edith Wharton

31.

The torments of martyrdom are probably most keenly felt by the bystanders.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

32.

I merely took the energy it takes to pout and wrote some blues.

Duke Ellington

33.

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

Kennedy, John F.

34.

The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.

Connolly, Cyril

35.

It's not your painting anymore. It stopped being your painting the moment that you finished it.

Jeff Melvoin

36.

Is there not an art, a music, and a stream of words that shalt be life, the acknowledged voice of life?

Wordsworth, William

37.

The great artist is a slave to his ideals.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

38.

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

Paz, Octavio

39.

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

Rosenberg, Harold

40.

The final purpose of art is to intensify, even, if necessary, to exacerbate, the moral consciousness of people.

Mailer, Norman

41.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

42.

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

Cather, Willa

43.

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

Gutzkow

44.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

45.

All paths are the same, leading nowhere. Therefore, pick a path with heart!

Castaneda, Carlos

46.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

47.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

48.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole

49.

I don't believe in total freedom for the artist. Left on his own, free to do anything he likes, the artist ends up doing nothing at all. If there's one thing that's dangerous for an artist, it's precisely this question of total freedom, waiting for inspiration and all the rest of it.

Federico Fellini

50.

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