Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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.

The moment you think you understand a great work of art, it's dead for you.

Wilson, Robert

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

Ginsberg, Allen

The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.

Berle, Adolf

Art is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth.

Sand, George

Bayley, Stephen

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

Contrary to popular belief an artist is never ahead of his time, but most people are far behind theirs.

Varese, Edward

The heart always sees before than the head can see.

Carlyle, Thomas

10.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark would burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

London, Jack

11.

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

Joseph Chilton Pearce

12.

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

13.

While I do not suggest that humanity will ever be able to dispense with its martyrs, I cannot avoid the suspicion that with a little more thought and a little less belief their number may be substantially reduced.

Haldane, John B. S.

14.

Whether joy or sorrowful, the heart needs a double, because a joy shared is doubled and a pain that is shared is divided.

Ruckett

15.

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

16.

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.

17.

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

Shaw, George Bernard

18.

Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods.

Murdoch, Iris

19.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Cocteau, Jean

20.

I like people and I like them to like me, but I wear my heart where God put it -- on the inside.

21.

There never was any heart truly great and generous, that was not also tender and compassionate.

Frost, Robert

22.

A work of art that contains theories is like an object on which the price tag has been left.

Proust, Marcel

23.

A frenzied passion for art is a canker that devours everything else.

Baudelaire, Charles

24.

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

Kael, Pauline

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.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

27.

You're confusing product with process. Most people, when they criticize, whether they like it or hate it, they're talking about product. That's not art, that's the result of art. Art, to whatever degree we can get a handle on (I'm not sure that we really can) is a process. It begins in the heart and the mind with the eyes and hands.

Jeff Melvoin

28.

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

29.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

Kooning, Willem De

30.

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

31.

The people who make art their business are mostly impostors.

Picasso, Pablo

32.

Repetition is the death of art.

Robin Green

33.

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

Conrad, Joseph

34.

Each painting has its own way of evolving...When the painting is finished, the subject reaveals itself.

William Baziotes

35.

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Barzun, Jacques

36.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Eckhart, Meister

37.

There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.

Matisse, Henri

38.

Art is a reality, not a definition; inasmuch as it approaches a reality, it approaches perfection, and inasmuch as it approaches a mere definition, it is imperfect and untrue.

Haydon, Benjamin

39.

Wherever art appears, life disappears.

Picabia, Francis

40.

Art, that great undogmatized church.

Key, Ellen

41.

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

42.

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.

43.

Most works of art, like most wines, ought to be consumed in the district of their fabrication.

West, Rebecca

44.

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

45.

Art teaches nothing, except the significance of life.

Miller, Henry

46.

Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts.

Einstein, Albert

47.

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

48.

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.

49.

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

Weil, Simone

50.

Charity is in the heart of man, and righteousness in the path of men. Pity the man who has lost his path and does not follow it and who has lost his heart and does not know how to recover it. When people's dogs and chicks are lost they go out and look for them and yet the people who have lost their hearts do not go out and look for them. The principle of self-cultivation consists in nothing but trying to look for the lost heart.

Mencius (Mengzi Meng-tse)