Motivational Quotes

Art

Let each man exercise the art he knows.

- Aristophanes

Best Quotes about Art

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

Blackie, Professor

I paint my own reality. The only thing I know is that I paint because I need to, and I paint whatever passes through my head without any other consideration.

Frida Kahlo

Art is the objectification of feeling.

Langer, Suzanne K.

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

Saint-Victor, Richard of

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

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

I know just how frustrating it can be when you're tired and exhausted, but you still want to draw something.

Ward Jenkins

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.

Pablo Picasso

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

Updike, John

10.

Every artist writes his own autobiography.

Ellis, Havelock

11.

The more a man cultivates the arts the less he fornicates. A more and more apparent cleavage occurs between the spirit and the brute.

Baudelaire, Charles

12.

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

David Cronenberg

13.

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life, by artificial means and hold it fixed so that a hundred years later, when a stranger looks at it, it moves again since it is life. Since man is mortal, the only immortality possible for him is to leave something behind him that is immortal since it will always move. This is the artist's way of scribbling Kilroy was here on the wall of the final and irrevocable oblivion through which he must someday pass.

Faulkner, William

14.

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

15.

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

Thurber, James

16.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

17.

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

Gide, Andre

18.

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.

19.

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

20.

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

21.

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

Duke Ellington

22.

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need. [when asked how he managed to make his remarkable statues.]

Rodin, Auguste

23.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

24.

Not even the visionary or mystical experience ever lasts very long. It is for art to capture that experience, to offer it to, in the case of literature, its readers; to be, for a secular, materialist culture, some sort of replacement for what the love of god offers in the world of faith.

Rushdie, Salman

25.

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

26.

The hidden harmony is better than the obvious.

Pope, Alexander

27.

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

28.

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.

Henry Ward Beecher

29.

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

Gutzkow

30.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Weil, Simone

31.

If your heart were sincere and upright, every creature would be unto you a looking-glass of life and a book of holy doctrine.

Kempis, Thomas

32.

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

33.

Art has never been made while thinking of art.

Niko Stumpo

34.

Art is an experience, not the formulation of a problem.

Anderson, Lindsay

35.

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. An artist recreates those aspects of reality which represent his fundamental view of man's nature.

Rand, Ayn

36.

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

Proverb, Chinese

37.

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

38.

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

39.

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

40.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

41.

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

42.

There is in every human heart Some not completely barren part, Where seeds of truth and love might grow, And flowers of generous virtue flow; To plant, to watch, to water there, This be our duty, be our care.

Bowring, Sir John

43.

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

Camus, Albert

44.

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

45.

A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent upon arriving. A good artist lets his intuition lead him wherever it wants.

Lao-Tzu

46.

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

47.

Another unsettling element in modern art is that common symptom of immaturity, the dread of doing what has been done before.

Edith Wharton

48.

I will soon be going out to shape all the singing tomorrows.