Motivational Quotes

Art

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

Best Quotes about Art

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

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

Ruckett

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

Kael, Pauline

The function of art is to make that understood which in the form of argument would be incomprehensible.

Brancusi, Constantin

Every artist was first an amateur.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Life isn't long enough for love and art.

W. Somerset Maugham

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

Jeff Melvoin

The artist belongs to their work, not the work to the artist.

Novalis

Art is too serious to be taken seriously.

Reinhardt, Ad

10.

In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti, but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent businessman.

Lewis, Sinclair

11.

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

12.

Great art is the contempt of a great man for small art.

13.

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

Eliot, T. S.

14.

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.

15.

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

16.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

17.

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.

18.

This grandiose tragedy that we call modern art.

Dali, Salvador

19.

Nature is inside art as its content, not outside as its model.

Frye, Northrop

20.

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

William Baziotes

21.

Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.

Mcluhan, Marshall

22.

Art is only a means to life, to the life more abundant. It is not in itself the life more abundant. It merely points the way, something which is overlooked not only by the public, but very often by the artist himself. In becoming an end it defeats itself.

Miller, Henry

23.

By the time a partnership dissolves, it has dissolved.

Updike, John

24.

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

25.

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

26.

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

Rosenberg, Harold

27.

I am an artist I am here to live out loud.

Zola, Emile

28.

I can't work without a model. I won't say I turn my back on nature ruthlessly in order to turn a study into a picture, arranging the colors, enlarging and simplifying; but in the matter of form I am too afraid of departing from the possible and the true.

Gogh, Vincent Van

29.

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

30.

Labor is the beginning, the middle, and the end of art.

31.

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

Schiller, Johann Friedrich Von

32.

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

Howe, Nathaniel

33.

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.

34.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves they have a better idea.

Ciardi, John

35.

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

Stephen Nachmanovitch

36.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.

Voznesensky, Andrei

37.

I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.

Beck

38.

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

39.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

40.

One of the most striking signs of the decay of art is when we see its separate forms jumbled together.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

41.

Art is born of the observation and investigation of nature.

Cicero

42.

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

Ovid

43.

Seek not good from without: seek it within yourselves, or you will never find it.

Suttner, Bertha Von

44.

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

45.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

46.

In our own hearts, we mold the whole world's hereafters; and in our own hearts we fashion our own gods.

Melville, Herman

47.

Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.

Churchill, Winston

48.

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

49.

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

Kronenberger, Louis

50.

It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it --just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.

Camus, Albert