Motivational Quotes

Art

Art is merely the refuge which the ingenious have invented, when they were supplied with food and women, to escape the tediousness of life.

- W. Somerset Maugham

Best Quotes about Art

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

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

Art never improves, but the material of art is never quite the same.

Eliot, T. S.

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

Bowen, Elizabeth

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

Kronenberger, Louis

The sole art that suits me is that which, rising from unrest, tends toward serenity.

Gide, Andre

Not the glittering weapon fights the fight, but rather the hero's heart.

Proverb

Great persecutors are recruited among martyrs whose heads haven't been cut off.

Cioran, E. M.

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

10.

The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.

Piet Mondrian

11.

Art is the signature of civilizations.

Sills, Beverly

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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

15.

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.

16.

In any society, the artist has a responsibility. His effectiveness is certainly limited and a painter or writer cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is important.

Bunuel, Luis

17.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

18.

The public history of modern art is the story of conventional people not knowing what they are dealing with.

Motherwell, Robert

19.

The martyr sacrifices themselves entirely in vain. Or rather not in vain; for they make the selfish more selfish, the lazy more lazy, the narrow narrower.

Nightingale, Florence

20.

What distinguishes a great artist from a weak one is first their sensibility and tenderness; second, their imagination, and third, their industry.

Ruskin, John

21.

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

22.

Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.

Barenboim, Daniel

23.

The idea of a mass audience was really an invention of the Industrial Revolution.

David Cronenberg

24.

Art forms of the past were really considered elitist. Bach did not compose for the masses, neither did Beethoven. It was always for patrons, aristocrats, and royalty. Now we have a sort of democratic version of that, which is to say that the audience is so splintered in its interests.

David Cronenberg

25.

Whether a party can have much success without a woman present I must ask others to decide, but one thing is certain, no party is any fun unless seasoned with folly.

Erasmus, Desiderius

26.

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

27.

Modern pictures are, no doubt, delightful to look at. At least, some of them are. But they are quite impossible to live with; they are too clever, too assertive, too intellectual. Their meaning is too obvious, and their method too clearly defined. One

Wilde, Oscar

28.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

29.

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

30.

The art of art, the glory of expression and the sunshine of the light of letters, is simplicity.

Walt Whitman

31.

Creative work is play. It is free speculation using materials of one's chosen form.

Stephen Nachmanovitch

32.

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

Ginsberg, Allen

33.

It is not flesh and blood, but heart which makes us fathers and sons.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

34.

As the arteries grow hard, the heart grows soft.

Mencken, H. L.

35.

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

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander

36.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

37.

You cannot kindle a fire in any other heart until it is burning in your own.

38.

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

Picasso, Pablo

39.

Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self.

Godard, Jean-Luc

40.

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

41.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

42.

Use your head and your heart, its not everything but its a start.

43.

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

44.

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

Lowell, James Russell

45.

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

Cather, Willa

46.

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

Ovid

47.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

48.

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

49.

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.

50.

An artist is somebody who produces things that people don't need to have.

Warhol, Andy