Motivational Quotes

Art

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

- Barenboim, Daniel

Best Quotes about Art

What is art but a way of seeing?

Berger, Thomas

Any artist should be grateful for a na?ve grace which puts him beyond the need to reason elaborately.

Bellow, Saul

Balance is the enemy of art.

Eyre, Richard

The artist must conceive with warmth yet execute with coolness.

Winkelmann

But the one thing you should. not do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.

Pound, Ezra

Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.

G. K. Chesterton

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it -- a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand -- as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art.

Chagall, Marc

For us artists there waits the joyous compromise through art with all that wounded or defeated us in daily life; in this way, not to evade destiny, as the ordinary people try to do, but to fulfil it in its true potential --the imagination.

Durrell, Lawrence

All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.

M. C. Richards

10.

Any work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line.

Conrad, Joseph

11.

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

Blackie, Professor

12.

No manager ever won no ballgames.

Anderson, Sparky

13.

The heart that truly loves never forgets.

Proverb

14.

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

Jacob, Max

15.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

16.

All art is an imitation of nature.

Seneca

17.

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

18.

Without poets, without artists, men would soon weary of nature's monotony. The sublime idea men have of the universe would collapse with dizzying speed. The order which we find in nature, and which is only an effect of art, would at once vanish. Everything would break up in chaos. There would be no seasons, no civilization, no thought, no humanity; even life would give way, and the impotent void would reign everywhere.

Apollinaire, Guillaume

19.

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

20.

A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.

Ionesco, Eugene

21.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

22.

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

Waugh, Evelyn

23.

In order for the artist to have a world to express he must first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a man among men.

Beauvoir, Simone De

24.

The creative artist seems to be almost the only kind of man that you could never meet on neutral ground. You can only meet him as an artist. He sees nothing objectively because his own ego is always in the foreground of every picture.

Chandler, Raymond

25.

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.

26.

O, had I but followed the arts!

Shakespeare, William

27.

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.

28.

Art raises its head where creeds relax.

Nietzsche, Friedrich

29.

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

30.

With an apple I will astonish Paris.

Cezanne, Paul

31.

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

32.

Have thy heart in heaven and thy hands upon the earth. Ascend in piety and descend in charity. For this is the Nature of Light and the way of the children.

Vaughan, Thomas

33.

Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

34.

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

35.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

36.

No human beings more dangerous than those who have suffered for a belief: the great persecutors are recruited from the martyrs not quite beheaded. Far from diminishing the appetite for power, suffering exasperates it.

Cioran, E. M.

37.

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

38.

Art is a form of catharsis.

Parker, Dorothy

39.

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

Castaneda, Carlos

40.

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

Edith Wharton

41.

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.

42.

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

43.

We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.

John F. Kennedy

44.

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

45.

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

Updike, John

46.

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.

47.

What ever purifies the heart also fortifies it.

Blair, Hugh

48.

It is all very well, when the pen flows, but then there are the dark days when imagination deserts one, and it is an effort to put anything down on paper. That little you have achieved stares at you at the end of the day, and you know the next morning you will have to scrape it down and start again.

Elizabeth Aston

49.

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

Pablo Picasso

50.

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