Motivational Quotes

Art

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.

Best Quotes about Art

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

Blackie, Professor

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

Piet Mondrian

As noble Art has survived noble nature, so too she marches ahead of it, fashioning and awakening by her inspiration. Before Truth sends her triumphant light into the depths of the heart, imagination catches its rays, and the peaks of humanity will be glowing when humid night still lingers in the valleys.

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

I am more afraid of my own heart than the Pope and all his cardinals. I have within me the great Pope, Self.

Luther, Martin

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

The contemporary thing in art and literature is the thing which doesn't make enough difference to the people of that generation so that they can accept it or reject it.

Stein, Gertrude

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

Motherwell, Robert

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Schnitzler, Arthur

The dignity of the artist lies in his duty of keeping awake the sense of wonder in the world. In this long vigil he often has to vary his methods of stimulation; but in this long vigil he is also himself striving against a continual tendency to sleep.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

10.

In a decaying society, art, if it is truthful, must also reflect decay. And unless it wants to break faith with its social function, art must show the world as changeable. And help to change it.

Fischer, Ernst

11.

Irresponsibility is part of the pleasure of all art; it is the part the schools cannot recognize.

Kael, Pauline

12.

Sculpture and painting have the effect of teaching us manners and abolishing hurry.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

14.

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

15.

In art, one idea is as good as another. If one takes the idea of trembling, for instance, all of a sudden most art starts to tremble. Michelangelo starts to tremble. El Greco starts to tremble. All the Impressionists start to tremble.

Kooning, Willem De

16.

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

17.

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

Godard, Jean-Luc

18.

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

Cioran, E. M.

19.

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.

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.

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

Klee, Paul

22.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

23.

Advice from a veteran trapeze performer: Throw your heart over the bars and your body will follow.

24.

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

Jeff Melvoin

25.

The less you open your heart to others, the more your heart suffers.

Chopra, Deepak

26.

What is Art? It is the response of man's creative soul to the call of the Real.

Tagore, Rabindranath

27.

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

Riding, Laura

28.

I can't criticize what I don't understand. If you want to call this art, you've got the benefit of all my doubts.

Charles Rosin

29.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

30.

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

Miguel de Cervantes

31.

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

Jacob, Max

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

35.

The artist is a member of the leisured classes who cannot pay for his leisure.

Connolly, Cyril

36.

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

37.

For the outer sense alone perceives visible things and the eye of the heart alone seeds the invisible.

Saint-Victor, Richard of

38.

I think there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is softness of head.

Roosevelt, Theodore

39.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

40.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh.

Parker, Theodore

41.

All great art, and today all great artlessness, must appear extreme to the mass of men, as we know them today. It springs from the anguish of great souls. From the souls of men not formed, but deformed in factories whose inspiration is pelf.

Trocchi, Alexander

42.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

43.

On with the dance! let joy be unconfined; no sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet to chase the glowing hours with flying feet.

Gordon, George

44.

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

Eliot, T. S.

45.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

46.

Art is either plagiarism or revolution.

Paul Gauguin

47.

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

Baruch, Bernard M.

48.

Making social comment is an artificial place for an artist to start from. If an artist is touched by some social condition, what the artist creates will reflect that, but you can't force it.

Lewitzky, Bella

49.

It is not in life, but in art that self-fulfillment is to be found.

Woodberry, George E.

50.

In art as in love, instinct is enough.

France, Anatole